A heated discussion lately spread widely on social media, following someone asked a query for females: which would you prefer be lost in a forest alongside a male or a bear? Like all the most engaging hypothetical scenarios, it exposed vastly opposing worldviews and life encounters, illuminated divides among genders, and could easily to induce a deep personal dilemma for anyone pondering on it extensively. There was also the predictable follow-up in which some males took to the internet to inform females how foolish they were to select the bear and went on to limn the punishments they merited for that choice. This at least enabled the women who had been hesitating about their decision to make it with renewed assurance.
Dramatising the Setup
To Cook a Bear effectively dramatises this clever little setup. The six-part drama is based from Scandinavian writer Mikael Niemi’s 2018 book with the identical title (rendered in 2020 for English readers). It follows the struggles of a clergyman (the lead actor) and his family when they arrive to begin a fresh religious post within Kengis, an isolated settlement in Sweden’s north, during the mid-19th century. In a place with few pleasures, none of the locals particularly warm to his strict approach to drinking and revelry, yet it is his protection of the poor – especially the indigenous Sami, from among whom comes the preacher’s adopted son the youth Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in social justice and equality that places him in direct opposition against the Kengis powers that be.
The Opposing Forces
Soon collaborating against him are the lawman the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the intimidating mill owner Madam Sjödahl (the actress), observed initially dismissing a newly injured laborer with a month’s pay as he remains gibbering at the sight of his pulped hand, and all others who profit from a community who can be bought for a few bottles of liquor provided by the unsettling store owner the merchant Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). Although, to be fair, Lindmark’s eeriness pales when itinerant painter the artist Beronius arrives on the scene (Simon J Berger, providing a performance of rare discomfiting power). If they are – similar to the clergyman – just slightly beyond being stereotypes, they still serve as effective ones.
Narrative Development
With the seeds of conflict sown, it is time to get down to narrative business. The servant from the doctor’s house, Hilda (the actress), accordingly goes missing from the woods. Indications of her flight and animal scratches upon a trunk get discovered but she is completely absent. Gossip and anxieties regarding a human-devouring bear roaming the woods spread, yet the clergyman holds a different view that he and Jussi set out to prove.
A Strange Creation
This Bear Drama is a slightly peculiar show. It conjures a fine sense of the desolation that lets suspicion and bias and grim legends thrive from the native legend that bears can be controlled or possessed by the souls of humans. And it doesn’t romanticise the hardscrabble life led by the villagers, in which violence, whether that of nature or mankind, always looms at the periphery, waiting to erupt. Yet the personas seldom evolve beyond symbols – or maybe, while the conflicts between justice and revenge, rationality and religion, good and evil intensify, representative characters within a moral tale – which stops the entire production truly becoming immersive.
Tonal Inconsistencies
Additionally, there are the many tonally jarring moments where the clergyman’s skill in finding evidence and determine Hilda’s fate turns almost risible. He positions himself looking at shattered containers and clumps of hair in hay barns as a fusion of the Belgian detective the English sleuth – alongside Jussi a rather hapless assistant figure (none of whom were required to lick a blend of blood droplets and the boss’s spit to confirm that indeed, it was clearly dried blood at the crime scene), prior to declaring his newest conclusion and pulling a body from a bog.
Clashing Agendas
The village elite are determined demonstrating that Hilda was killed by an animal, perhaps to protect the calm, or possibly to protect one of their own. The pastor is bent on establishing the opposite, and the evidence so quickly stacks up in his favour that again the drama’s plausibility and the viewer’s patience are tested. In its finest moments, To Cook a Bear is reminiscent of the TV version some years back of the author’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the competing allures and fears offered by science and religion. In its low points, it resembles Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Still, it does seem to provide the response to the earlier query: “Ladies, take the bear.”
The series streams on Disney+ now.
