An intense discussion lately spread widely on social media, after someone asked a query for females: 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 worldviews and life encounters, illuminated chasms between the sexes, and could easily to induce an existential crisis for anyone pondering on it for too long. Additionally, there came the predictable coda in which some males came online to tell women how stupid they had been to select the animal and went on to limn the punishments they merited for that choice. This at least allowed those females who were uncertain over their choice to decide with a new confidence.
Dramatising the Scenario
To Cook a Bear skillfully brings to life this nifty little setup. This six-episode drama is based from Swedish author Mikael Niemi’s 2018 book with the identical title (rendered two years later for an English audience). It traces the struggles of a clergyman (the lead actor) and his household as they come to start a fresh religious post in Kengis, a remote settlement in Sweden’s north, during the mid-19th century. In a place with few pleasures, not one of the locals especially warm to his strict approach to alcohol and dancing, but it is his protection of impoverished people – particularly the native Sami population, from which comes the pastor’s foster child the youth Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in societal fairness and equal rights that sets him in direct opposition with the Kengis local authorities.
The Antagonists
Quickly collaborating opposing him include the lawman the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the fearsome mill owner the matron Sjödahl (Pernilla August), seen early on firing a recently mangled laborer with a month’s pay while he is still gibbering upon seeing his crushed hand, and anyone else who benefit from a populace who can be bought for a few bottles of liquor provided by the creepy store owner the merchant Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). However, in fairness, Lindmark’s creepiness pales when travelling artist the artist Beronius appears in the story (Simon J Berger, providing a performance of exceptional unsettling intensity). If they are – similar to the clergyman – only a little more than caricatures, they are at least potent archetypes.
Plot Progression
Once the foundations of tension planted, the moment arrives to proceed to narrative business. The maid employed by the doctor, the character Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), duly goes missing in the forest. Signs of her escape and animal scratches upon a trunk are found but she is nowhere to be seen. Gossip and anxieties of a man/maid-eating bear prowling the woods spread, yet the clergyman has another theory which he and his ward set out to prove.
An Odd Beast
This Bear Drama is a somewhat odd beast. It conjures a fine sense of the bleakness that lets suspicion and bias and dark myths flourish based on local folklore that bears can be controlled or inhabited by the spirits of men. It avoids romanticise the hardscrabble life led by the villagers, in which brutality, whether that of the wild or mankind, lurks constantly at the periphery, poised to explode. Yet the personas seldom evolve beyond symbols – or maybe, as the struggles amid fairness and revenge, logic and faith, good and wickedness escalate, representative characters within a moral tale – which stops the whole thing fully becoming immersive.
Stylistic Shifts
Additionally, exist numerous tonally jarring instances where the pastor’s ability to discover clues and discern the maid’s destiny becomes nearly laughable. He positions himself looking at broken milk pots and strands of fur within storage sheds as a fusion of the Belgian detective the English sleuth – with Jussi a rather hapless Hastings-cum-Watson (neither of whom had to lick a mixture of blood spatter and the boss’s spit to confirm that, yes, it was clearly dried blood at the crime scene), before announcing his newest conclusion and pulling a corpse from a bog.
Clashing Agendas
The village elite are bent on demonstrating that Hilda was killed by a bear, maybe to protect the peace, perhaps to protect one of their own. The pastor is bent on establishing the opposite, and the evidence so rapidly accumulates in his favour that once more the drama’s plausibility and the viewer’s patience are tested. In its finest moments, To Cook a Bear evokes memories of the TV version some years back of Sarah Perry’s the serpent tale, with its evocation of the opposing allures and fears presented by rational thought and belief. In its low points, it resembles Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Nevertheless, it does seem to provide the response to the earlier query: “Ladies, take the bear.”
The series streams on Disney+ currently.
