An intense discussion recently went viral on social media, after someone posed a query to women: which would you prefer be lost in a forest alongside a male or with a bear? Like all the best hypothetical scenarios, it exposed wildly different perspectives and experiences, illuminated divides between the sexes, and could easily cause an existential crisis if you thought about it extensively. Additionally, there came the predictable follow-up in which men of a certain stripe took to the internet to inform females how foolish they had been for choosing the bear and went on to limn the consequences they merited for that choice. This at least enabled those females who were uncertain over their choice to decide with a new confidence.
Dramatising the Setup
To Cook a Bear effectively brings to life this clever little setup. This six-episode series is adapted from Scandinavian writer Mikael Niemi’s 2018 novel with the identical title (rendered two years later for English readers). It follows the tribulations of a pastor (the lead actor) and his family when they arrive to begin a new ministry within Kengis, a remote village in Sweden’s north, in 1852. Within a community lacking many joys, none of the inhabitants especially appreciate his puritanical stance on drinking and revelry, yet it is his protection of the poor – particularly the indigenous Sami, from among whom comes the preacher’s adopted son Jussi (the young actor) – and his conviction in societal fairness and equal rights that sets him on a collision course against the Kengis powers that be.
The Antagonists
Soon collaborating opposing him include the lawman Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the fearsome factory proprietor the matron Sjödahl (Pernilla August), observed early on dismissing a recently mangled worker with minimal compensation as he remains babbling at the sight of his pulped hand, and anyone else who benefit from a populace easily swayed for a few bottles of liquor provided by the unsettling store owner the merchant Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). Although, to be fair, Lindmark’s eeriness diminishes once itinerant painter the artist Beronius arrives in the story (the performer, delivering an acting turn of rare unsettling intensity). While they remain – similar to the clergyman – just slightly beyond than caricatures, they are at least potent archetypes.
Narrative Development
Once the foundations of tension sown, the moment arrives to proceed to narrative business. The servant employed by the doctor, Hilda (the actress), duly vanishes in the forest. Signs of her escape and bear markings upon a trunk get discovered but she is nowhere to be seen. Rumours and anxieties of a man/maid-eating beast prowling the woodland circulate, but the pastor has another theory that he and Jussi embark to prove.
An Odd Beast
To Cook a Bear is a slightly odd beast. It creates a fine sense of the desolation that allows suspicion and bias and dark myths thrive from the native legend that bears might be dominated or possessed by the spirits of men. It avoids romanticise the tough existence experienced by the residents, where violence, whether that of the wild or people, lurks constantly at the periphery, poised to explode. Yet the personas seldom evolve more than ciphers – or maybe, as the struggles amid fairness and revenge, rationality and faith, good and evil escalate, emblematic figures within a moral tale – preventing the whole thing fully becoming immersive.
Stylistic Shifts
And then, exist the many tonally jarring moments in which the clergyman’s skill to discover clues and determine Hilda’s fate turns nearly laughable. He stands observing broken milk pots and clumps of hair in hay barns as a fusion of the Belgian detective the English sleuth – alongside Jussi a rather hapless Hastings-cum-Watson (neither of whom had to taste a mixture of blood spatter and the boss’s spit to agree that, yes, it was clearly coagulated blood on the site), before announcing his newest conclusion and extracting a body from a bog.
Clashing Agendas
The village elite are determined proving that the maid was killed by an animal, maybe to protect the calm, or possibly to protect one of their own. The clergyman is bent on proving the opposite, and the proof so rapidly stacks up supporting his view that once more the drama’s plausibility and audience tolerance get strained. At its best, the series evokes memories of the TV version a few years ago of Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, through its portrayal of the competing attractions and terrors presented by science and religion. At its worst, it resembles Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Still, it appears to offer the response to that debated question: “Ladies, take the bear.”
To Cook a Bear is on Disney+ now.
