A intense debate recently spread widely across online platforms, after a user posed a query to women: would you rather be lost in a forest alongside a male or a bear? Like all the best hypothetical scenarios, it revealed vastly opposing worldviews and life encounters, highlighted chasms among genders, and was likely to induce an existential crisis if you thought about it extensively. Additionally, there came the predictable coda in which men of a certain stripe took to the internet to tell females how stupid they had been to select the animal and proceeded to limn the consequences they merited for that choice. This at minimum allowed the women who had been hesitating about their decision to make it with a new confidence.
Dramatising the Setup
To Cook a Bear effectively dramatises this nifty little setup. The six-part series is adapted on Swedish author Mikael Niemi’s 2018 book with the identical title (rendered two years later for an English audience). It follows the struggles of a clergyman (the lead actor) and his family as they come to begin a fresh religious post within Kengis, an isolated village in Sweden’s north, during the mid-19th century. Within a community with few pleasures, none of the locals particularly warm to his strict stance on drinking and revelry, but it is his defense of impoverished people – particularly the native Sami population, from which hails the preacher’s adopted son the youth Jussi (the young actor) – and his belief in social justice and equality that places him on a collision course with the Kengis powers that be.
The Opposing Forces
Soon collaborating opposing him include the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the fearsome factory proprietor the matron Sjödahl (Pernilla August), seen initially firing a newly injured worker with minimal compensation as he remains gibbering 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 shopkeeper Lindmark (the actor). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s eeriness diminishes when itinerant painter the artist Beronius arrives on the scene (the performer, providing an acting turn of exceptional unsettling intensity). While they remain – like the pastor himself – just slightly beyond than caricatures, they are at least effective ones.
Plot Progression
With the seeds of conflict planted, it is time to get down to narrative business. The servant employed by the doctor, Hilda (the actress), accordingly goes missing in the forest. Indications of her escape and bear markings upon a trunk are found yet she remains completely absent. Rumours and fears of a man/maid-eating beast prowling the woods circulate, but the pastor has another theory that he and Jussi set out to prove.
A Strange Creation
This Bear Drama is a somewhat peculiar show. It conjures a strong impression of the desolation that lets distrust and prejudice and dark myths thrive from the native legend that animals can be controlled or inhabited by the souls of humans. It avoids idealising the tough existence experienced by the residents, where violence, whether that of the wild or people, lurks constantly on the edges, poised to explode. But the characters rarely become beyond symbols – or perhaps, while the conflicts amid fairness and vengeance, logic and religion, virtue and evil intensify, emblematic figures in a fable – preventing the entire production fully coming to life.
Stylistic Shifts
Additionally, exist the many tonally jarring instances in which the clergyman’s skill in finding evidence and discern the maid’s destiny turns nearly laughable. He positions himself observing shattered containers and clumps of hair in hay barns like a combined the Belgian detective and Sherlock Holmes – with Jussi a particularly unfortunate assistant figure (none of whom were required to taste a blend of blood droplets and the boss’s spit to agree that indeed, it was definitely dried blood on the site), before announcing his newest conclusion and extracting a body out of a swamp.
Clashing Agendas
The village elite are determined demonstrating that the maid met her end by a bear, perhaps to preserve the peace, or possibly to shield a fellow elite. The clergyman is bent on establishing the opposite, and the evidence so rapidly accumulates supporting his view that again the drama’s plausibility and the viewer’s patience get strained. In its finest moments, To Cook a Bear is reminiscent of the adaptation a few years ago of the author’s The Essex Serpent, through its portrayal of the opposing attractions and fears presented by rational thought and religion. In its low points, it’s more like Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Still, it appears to provide the answer to that debated question: “Ladies, take the bear.”
The series streams on Disney+ currently.
