A heated debate lately spread widely across online platforms, after a user posed the question for females: which would you prefer find yourself stranded in the woods alongside a male or a bear? Like all the best thought experiments, it exposed wildly different worldviews and experiences, highlighted chasms between the sexes, and was likely cause a deep personal dilemma for anyone pondering about it extensively. Additionally, there came the almost inevitable follow-up in which some males came online to inform females how stupid they had been for choosing the animal and went on to limn the punishments they deserved for it. This at minimum enabled those females who were uncertain over their choice to decide with renewed assurance.
Portraying the Scenario
To Cook a Bear effectively dramatises this nifty small premise. This six-episode series is based on Scandinavian writer Mikael Niemi’s 2018 book of the same name (rendered in 2020 for an English audience). It follows the tribulations of a pastor (the lead actor) and his household as they come to start a fresh religious post within Kengis, an isolated settlement in northern Sweden, during the mid-19th century. Within a community lacking many joys, none of the locals particularly warm to his puritanical approach to drinking and revelry, yet it is his protection of impoverished people – particularly the native Sami population, from which hails the preacher’s foster child Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in societal fairness and equal rights that sets him in direct opposition against the Kengis local authorities.
The Opposing Forces
Soon in cahoots against him are the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the fearsome factory proprietor the matron Sjödahl (Pernilla August), seen initially dismissing a recently mangled laborer with a month’s pay while he is still babbling upon seeing his crushed hand, and all others who benefit from a populace who can be bought for a few bottles of liquor provided by the unsettling store owner Lindmark (the actor). However, in fairness, Lindmark’s eeriness pales once travelling artist Beronius appears in the story (the performer, delivering an acting turn of exceptional unsettling intensity). If they are – like the pastor himself – only a little more than caricatures, they still serve as effective ones.
Narrative Development
Once the foundations of conflict sown, the moment arrives to proceed with the storyline. The servant from the doctor’s house, Hilda (the actress), duly vanishes from the woods. Indications of her flight and animal scratches on a tree get discovered yet she remains nowhere to be seen. Rumours and fears regarding a human-devouring bear roaming the woods spread, but the pastor holds a different view that he and Jussi set out to verify.
An Odd Beast
This Bear Drama is a somewhat peculiar show. It creates a fine sense of the bleakness that allows suspicion and prejudice and grim legends thrive from the native legend that bears can be controlled or possessed by the souls of men. And it doesn’t romanticise the hardscrabble life experienced by the villagers, in which violence, be it from nature or people, always looms on the edges, waiting to erupt. Yet the personas rarely become more than ciphers – or perhaps, while the conflicts between justice and vengeance, rationality and faith, good and evil escalate, emblematic figures within a moral tale – preventing the whole thing fully coming to life.
Stylistic Shifts
Additionally, there are the many tonally jarring instances where the clergyman’s skill to discover clues and determine the maid’s destiny becomes almost risible. He stands observing shattered containers and strands of fur within storage sheds like a combined Hercule Poirot the English sleuth – with Jussi a particularly unfortunate Hastings-cum-Watson (neither of whom had to taste a blend of blood spatter and the boss’s spit to agree that, yes, it was definitely coagulated blood on the site), prior to declaring his latest deduction and pulling a body out of a swamp.
Opposing Goals
The village elite are bent on demonstrating that the maid was killed by an animal, maybe to preserve the calm, perhaps to shield one of their own. The clergyman is bent on establishing otherwise, and the proof so quickly accumulates supporting his view that once more the show’s credibility and audience tolerance get strained. At its best, To Cook a Bear evokes memories of the TV version some years back of the author’s The Essex Serpent, through its portrayal of the opposing allures and fears presented by science and religion. At its worst, it’s more like a bear-themed police procedural. Nevertheless, it appears to provide the answer to the earlier query: “Ladies, take the bear.”
To Cook a Bear streams on Disney+ currently.
