A intense debate lately spread widely on social media, after a user posed a query for females: would you rather be lost in a forest with a man or a bear? Like all the most engaging thought experiments, it revealed vastly opposing worldviews and experiences, illuminated chasms among genders, and could easily cause an existential crisis if you thought on it extensively. There was also the almost inevitable follow-up in which men of a certain stripe took to the internet to tell females how foolish they had been to select the animal and went on to limn the consequences they deserved for it. This at least enabled the women who had been hesitating about their decision to decide with a new confidence.
Dramatising the Setup
To Cook a Bear skillfully dramatises this nifty small premise. This six-episode series is based from Swedish author Mikael Niemi’s 2018 novel with the identical title (rendered in 2020 for an English audience). It follows the tribulations of a pastor (the lead actor) and his household as they come to begin a fresh religious post in Kengis, a remote settlement in northern Sweden, in 1852. Within a community lacking many joys, not one of the locals particularly appreciate his puritanical approach to drinking and dancing, but it is his protection of the poor – especially the indigenous Sami, from among whom hails the pastor’s foster child the youth Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in social justice and equality that sets him on a collision course against the Kengis local authorities.
The Opposing Forces
Soon collaborating opposing him are the lawman the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the fearsome mill owner the matron Sjödahl (the actress), seen initially firing a newly injured worker with minimal compensation while he is still gibbering upon seeing of his pulped hand, and anyone else who profit from a community easily swayed with some containers of liquor provided by the unsettling shopkeeper Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). Although, to be fair, Lindmark’s creepiness pales once travelling artist the artist Beronius appears in the story (the performer, providing a performance of exceptional discomfiting power). While they remain – like the pastor himself – only a little more being stereotypes, they are at least potent archetypes.
Narrative Development
Once the foundations of conflict sown, it is time to get down to narrative business. The maid from the doctor’s house, the character Hilda (the actress), accordingly goes missing in the forest. Indications of her escape and animal scratches upon a trunk are found but she is nowhere to be seen. Gossip and fears of a man/maid-eating bear roaming the woodland circulate, yet the clergyman has another theory that he and Jussi set out to prove.
A Strange Creation
This Bear Drama is a somewhat peculiar show. It conjures a fine sense of the bleakness that lets suspicion and bias and dark myths thrive from the native legend that animals can be controlled or inhabited by the spirits of men. And it doesn’t idealising the tough existence experienced by the villagers, in which brutality, be it from nature or mankind, lurks constantly at the periphery, poised to explode. But the characters rarely become beyond symbols – or perhaps, as the struggles amid fairness and revenge, logic and religion, good and evil escalate, representative characters in a fable – which stops the entire production fully becoming immersive.
Stylistic Shifts
And then, there are numerous stylistically clashing instances where the clergyman’s skill to discover clues and discern the maid’s destiny turns nearly laughable. He stands observing shattered containers and strands of fur in hay barns as a fusion of Hercule Poirot the English sleuth – with Jussi a particularly unfortunate assistant figure (none of whom had to lick a mixture of blood spatter and saliva from his superior to agree that, yes, it was definitely dried blood at the crime scene), before announcing his latest deduction and extracting a corpse out of a swamp.
Clashing Agendas
The village elite are bent on proving that Hilda was killed by an animal, maybe to preserve the calm, or possibly to protect one of their own. The pastor is intent on establishing the opposite, and the evidence so rapidly accumulates in his favour that once more the show’s credibility and audience tolerance are tested. At its best, To Cook a Bear is reminiscent of the TV version a few years ago of Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the competing attractions and terrors offered by science and belief. At its worst, it’s more like Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Nevertheless, it does seem to offer the answer to the earlier query: “Females, choose the animal.”
To Cook a Bear is on Disney+ currently.
