An intense discussion lately spread widely on social media, following someone posed a query to women: which would you prefer be lost in a forest with a man or with a bear? Similar to the most engaging hypothetical scenarios, it exposed vastly opposing perspectives and experiences, highlighted divides among genders, and could easily cause a deep personal dilemma if you thought about it extensively. There was also the predictable coda in which some males came online to tell women how foolish they were to select the bear and went on to describe the consequences they merited for that choice. This at minimum allowed those females who were uncertain over their choice to decide with a new confidence.
Portraying the Setup
To Cook a Bear effectively brings to life this clever little setup. The six-part drama is based from Swedish author Mikael Niemi’s 2018 novel of the same name (translated two years later for an English audience). It traces the struggles of a pastor (the lead actor) and his household as they come to begin a fresh religious post within Kengis, an isolated settlement in northern Sweden, in 1852. In a place with few pleasures, not one of the inhabitants especially warm to his strict approach to drinking and revelry, but it is his protection of impoverished people – especially the indigenous Sami, from among whom comes the pastor’s foster child Jussi (the young actor) – and his conviction in social justice and equal rights that sets him on a collision course with the Kengis local authorities.
The Antagonists
Quickly collaborating opposing him include the lawman the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the fearsome factory proprietor Madam Sjödahl (Pernilla August), observed initially dismissing a newly injured worker with minimal compensation as he remains babbling at the sight his crushed hand, and anyone else who profit from a community who can be bought with some containers of liquor sold by the unsettling store owner Lindmark (the actor). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s eeriness diminishes once travelling artist the artist Beronius arrives on the scene (Simon J Berger, delivering a performance of rare discomfiting power). While they remain – like the pastor himself – just slightly beyond being stereotypes, they are at least effective ones.
Narrative Development
Once the foundations of tension planted, it is time to get down with the storyline. The servant from the doctor’s house, Hilda (the actress), duly vanishes in the forest. Signs of her escape and bear markings upon a trunk are found but she is nowhere to be seen. Gossip and anxieties of a man/maid-eating bear roaming the woods circulate, but the pastor has another theory which he and his ward set out to prove.
A Strange Creation
This Bear Drama is a slightly odd beast. It conjures a fine sense of the bleakness that allows suspicion and prejudice and dark myths thrive from the native legend that bears might be dominated or possessed by the souls of men. It avoids idealising the hardscrabble life led by the villagers, in which violence, be it from the wild or people, always looms on the edges, poised to explode. But the characters seldom evolve more than ciphers – or perhaps, as the struggles between justice and revenge, rationality and religion, virtue and evil escalate, emblematic figures within a moral tale – which stops the whole thing fully coming to life.
Stylistic Shifts
Additionally, exist numerous tonally jarring moments where the pastor’s ability to discover clues and determine Hilda’s fate turns almost risible. He positions himself looking at shattered containers and clumps of hair within storage sheds like a combined Hercule Poirot the English sleuth – alongside Jussi a particularly unfortunate assistant figure (none of whom had to taste a blend of blood droplets and saliva from his superior to agree that, yes, it was clearly 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 determined demonstrating that the maid was killed by an animal, maybe to preserve the calm, or possibly to protect a fellow elite. The clergyman is intent on proving the opposite, and the evidence so rapidly stacks up in his favour that once more the drama’s plausibility and audience tolerance are tested. At its best, To Cook a Bear is reminiscent of the adaptation some years back of the author’s The Essex Serpent, through its portrayal of the opposing allures and fears offered by science and belief. In its low points, it resembles a bear-themed police procedural. Still, it appears to provide the answer to that debated question: “Females, choose the animal.”
The series streams on Disney+ currently.
