An intense debate recently spread widely on social media, after a user posed a query for females: would you rather be lost in the woods alongside a male or with a bear? Similar to the most engaging thought experiments, it exposed wildly different worldviews and experiences, highlighted chasms among genders, and could easily to induce an existential crisis if you thought about it extensively. There was also the almost inevitable coda in which men of a certain stripe took to the internet to inform females how stupid they were to select the animal and proceeded to describe the punishments they merited for that choice. This at minimum allowed those females who were uncertain over their choice to make it with a new confidence.
Portraying the Scenario
To Cook a Bear effectively dramatises this clever little setup. The six-part series is based on Scandinavian writer Mikael Niemi’s 2018 novel with the identical title (translated in 2020 for an English audience). It traces the tribulations of a clergyman (the lead actor) and his family when they arrive to begin a new ministry in Kengis, an isolated settlement in Sweden’s north, in 1852. Within a community lacking many joys, not one of the locals particularly appreciate his strict stance on drinking and dancing, yet it is his protection of impoverished people – especially the indigenous Sami, from which hails the preacher’s adopted son the youth Jussi (the young actor) – and his conviction in societal fairness and equal rights that places him on a collision course with the Kengis powers that be.
The Antagonists
Soon collaborating against him include the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the fearsome factory proprietor Madam Sjödahl (the actress), observed early on firing a recently mangled worker with a month’s pay while he is still gibbering at the sight of his pulped hand, and anyone else who profit from a community easily swayed for a few bottles of the whisky provided by the creepy shopkeeper Lindmark (the actor). Although, to be fair, Lindmark’s eeriness diminishes when travelling artist the artist Beronius appears on the scene (Simon J Berger, providing a performance of rare unsettling intensity). If they are – similar to the clergyman – only a little more than caricatures, they are at least effective ones.
Narrative Development
Once the foundations of tension sown, the moment arrives to get down to narrative business. The servant employed by the doctor, the character Hilda (the actress), accordingly vanishes in the forest. Signs of her flight and animal scratches on a tree get discovered yet she remains completely absent. Gossip and anxieties of a man/maid-eating beast prowling the woods circulate, but the pastor has another theory which he and his ward set out to verify.
An Odd Beast
This Bear Drama is a slightly odd beast. It creates a strong impression of the desolation that lets distrust and bias and grim legends flourish based on local folklore that bears can be controlled or possessed by the spirits of men. And it doesn’t idealising the tough existence led by the villagers, in which violence, whether that of nature or people, lurks constantly at the periphery, waiting to erupt. But the characters rarely become more than ciphers – or perhaps, while the conflicts amid fairness and revenge, logic and religion, good and evil intensify, emblematic figures within a moral tale – preventing the whole thing truly coming to life.
Stylistic Shifts
Additionally, there are numerous stylistically clashing moments where the clergyman’s skill in finding evidence and determine Hilda’s fate becomes almost risible. He stands observing broken milk pots and strands of fur within storage sheds like a combined the Belgian detective the English sleuth – with Jussi a rather hapless assistant figure (neither of whom had to taste a blend of blood spatter and the boss’s spit to agree that indeed, it was definitely coagulated blood at the crime scene), before announcing his latest deduction and extracting a corpse out of a swamp.
Opposing Goals
The local leaders are bent on proving that Hilda was killed by an animal, maybe to protect the calm, or possibly to protect a fellow elite. The pastor is bent on proving the opposite, and the evidence so quickly stacks up supporting his view that again the show’s credibility and the viewer’s patience are tested. In its finest moments, To Cook a Bear evokes memories of the adaptation some years back of the author’s the serpent tale, with its evocation of the competing attractions and terrors presented by science and belief. In its low points, it resembles a bear-themed police procedural. Nevertheless, it appears to provide the answer to that debated question: “Ladies, take the bear.”
To Cook a Bear streams on Disney+ now.
