A heated discussion lately went viral on social media, following someone posed a query for females: which would you prefer find yourself stranded in a forest alongside a male or with a bear? Similar to the best hypothetical scenarios, it exposed wildly different perspectives and experiences, highlighted chasms between the sexes, and was likely to induce an existential crisis if you thought about it extensively. There was also the predictable coda in which some males came online to tell women how stupid they had been to select the animal and proceeded to describe the punishments they deserved for that choice. This at minimum allowed those females who were uncertain over their choice to make it with a new confidence.
Dramatising the Setup
To Cook a Bear effectively dramatises this clever little setup. This six-episode series is adapted on Swedish author Mikael Niemi’s 2018 novel with the identical title (translated two years later for English readers). It follows the tribulations of a clergyman (the lead actor) and his household when they arrive to start a fresh religious post within Kengis, a remote village in Sweden’s north, in 1852. In a place lacking many joys, not one of the locals particularly appreciate his puritanical stance on alcohol and revelry, but it is his defense of the poor – particularly the indigenous Sami, from which comes the pastor’s adopted son Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in societal fairness and equal rights that places him in direct opposition with the Kengis local authorities.
The Opposing Forces
Soon in cahoots against him are the sheriff the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the fearsome factory proprietor Madam Sjödahl (Pernilla August), seen early on firing a newly injured laborer with minimal compensation while he is still babbling upon seeing his crushed hand, and all others who benefit from a community who can be bought with some containers of the whisky sold by the unsettling shopkeeper Lindmark (the actor). Although, to be fair, Lindmark’s eeriness diminishes once travelling artist Beronius appears in the story (Simon J Berger, providing a performance of exceptional discomfiting power). If they are – like the pastor himself – just slightly beyond than caricatures, they still serve as effective ones.
Plot Progression
Once the foundations of conflict sown, it is time to get down to narrative business. The maid employed by the doctor, Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), duly vanishes from the woods. Signs of her escape and bear markings upon a trunk are found yet she remains nowhere to be seen. Rumours and anxieties regarding a human-devouring beast roaming the woodland spread, yet the clergyman has another theory which he and his ward set out to prove.
A Strange Creation
This Bear Drama is a somewhat odd beast. It conjures a strong impression of the desolation that lets suspicion and bias and dark myths thrive based on local folklore that animals can be controlled or possessed by the spirits of men. It avoids idealising the tough existence experienced by the residents, where brutality, be it from nature or mankind, always looms on the edges, waiting to erupt. Yet the personas seldom evolve more than ciphers – or perhaps, while the conflicts amid fairness and revenge, rationality and religion, good and wickedness intensify, emblematic figures within a moral tale – which stops the entire production truly becoming immersive.
Stylistic Shifts
Additionally, exist numerous tonally jarring moments where the pastor’s ability in finding evidence and discern Hilda’s fate becomes nearly laughable. He stands observing shattered containers and clumps of hair in hay barns as a fusion of the Belgian detective the English sleuth – alongside Jussi a particularly unfortunate Hastings-cum-Watson (neither of whom had to taste a mixture of blood spatter and saliva from his superior to confirm that indeed, it was clearly coagulated blood on the site), before announcing his latest deduction and extracting a corpse from a bog.
Opposing Goals
The village elite are bent on proving that Hilda was killed by an animal, maybe to preserve the calm, perhaps to protect a fellow elite. The clergyman is intent on establishing otherwise, and the proof so quickly accumulates in his favour that once more the drama’s plausibility and audience tolerance are tested. In its finest moments, To Cook a Bear evokes memories of the adaptation a few years ago of Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, through its portrayal of the competing allures and terrors presented by rational thought and belief. In its low points, it resembles a bear-themed police procedural. Nevertheless, it does seem to offer the answer to the earlier query: “Females, choose the animal.”
The series is on Disney+ currently.
