A intense discussion recently spread widely on social media, after someone posed a query for females: which would you prefer find yourself stranded in a forest with a man or a bear? Like all the most engaging thought experiments, it revealed vastly opposing perspectives and experiences, illuminated 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 females how foolish they had been to select the animal and went on to limn the punishments they deserved for that choice. This at minimum allowed the women who were uncertain over their choice to make it with a new confidence.
Portraying the Scenario
To Cook a Bear effectively brings to life this nifty small premise. The six-part drama is based from Swedish author Mikael Niemi’s 2018 novel of the same name (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 northern Sweden, in 1852. In a place with few pleasures, none of the locals especially warm to his puritanical approach to alcohol and revelry, but it is his defense of impoverished people – especially the indigenous Sami, from among whom hails the pastor’s adopted son the youth Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his conviction in social justice and equality that sets him in direct opposition with the Kengis powers that be.
The Opposing Forces
Soon in cahoots against him include the sheriff the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the intimidating mill owner the matron Sjödahl (Pernilla August), observed early on dismissing a newly injured laborer with a month’s pay while he is still gibbering upon seeing of his pulped hand, and anyone else who benefit from a community easily swayed with some containers of liquor provided by the unsettling shopkeeper Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). Although, to be fair, Lindmark’s eeriness pales when travelling artist Beronius appears on the scene (Simon J Berger, providing an acting turn of rare discomfiting power). If they are – similar to the clergyman – only a little more being stereotypes, they are at least effective ones.
Narrative Development
Once the foundations of conflict planted, the moment arrives to proceed to narrative business. The servant employed by the doctor, the character Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), duly vanishes in the forest. Indications of her escape and bear markings upon a trunk are found yet she remains completely absent. Rumours and anxieties regarding a human-devouring bear prowling the woodland spread, yet the clergyman holds a different view which he and his ward embark to prove.
An Odd Beast
To Cook a Bear is a slightly peculiar show. It conjures a fine sense of the bleakness that allows suspicion and prejudice and grim legends thrive based on local folklore that bears might be dominated or inhabited by the spirits of men. It avoids idealising the hardscrabble life led by the residents, where violence, whether that of the wild or mankind, lurks constantly at the periphery, waiting to erupt. Yet the personas rarely become beyond symbols – or perhaps, while the conflicts amid fairness and vengeance, logic and faith, good and wickedness intensify, emblematic figures in a fable – which stops the entire production fully coming to life.
Stylistic Shifts
Additionally, exist numerous tonally jarring instances in which the clergyman’s skill to discover clues and determine Hilda’s fate becomes almost risible. He positions himself observing broken milk pots and clumps of hair within storage sheds like a combined Hercule Poirot and Sherlock Holmes – alongside Jussi a particularly unfortunate Hastings-cum-Watson (neither of whom were required to taste a blend of blood spatter and the boss’s spit to agree that, yes, it was definitely coagulated blood at the crime scene), prior to declaring his latest deduction and pulling a body from a bog.
Opposing Goals
The local leaders are determined proving that Hilda was killed by an animal, maybe to protect the calm, or possibly to shield one of their own. The clergyman is intent on proving the opposite, and the proof so rapidly stacks up supporting his view that once more the drama’s plausibility and audience tolerance are tested. At its best, To Cook a Bear evokes memories of the adaptation a few years ago of Sarah Perry’s the serpent tale, with its evocation of the opposing attractions and fears offered by rational thought and religion. At its worst, it resembles a bear-themed police procedural. Still, it appears to provide the answer to that debated question: “Ladies, take the bear.”
The series is on Disney+ now.
