An heated debate recently went viral across online platforms, after a user asked a query for females: would you rather find yourself stranded in a forest with a man or with a bear? Like all the most engaging thought experiments, it exposed wildly different worldviews and experiences, illuminated chasms among genders, and was likely cause a deep personal dilemma for anyone pondering about it for too long. Additionally, there came the predictable coda where men of a certain stripe came online to inform women how foolish they were for choosing the bear and proceeded to describe the punishments they merited for that choice. This at least allowed those females who were uncertain about their decision to make it with renewed assurance.
Portraying the Setup
To Cook a Bear effectively dramatises this nifty little setup. This six-episode series is based from Scandinavian writer Mikael Niemi’s 2018 book with the identical title (rendered in 2020 for an English audience). It traces the struggles of a pastor (the lead actor) and his family as they come to start a fresh religious post within Kengis, a remote village in northern Sweden, in 1852. In a place with few pleasures, not one of the locals especially warm to his puritanical stance on drinking and dancing, yet it is his protection of the poor – particularly the indigenous Sami, from which hails the preacher’s adopted son Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in societal fairness and equality that places him on a collision course with the Kengis powers that be.
The Opposing Forces
Soon in cahoots against him are the sheriff the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the intimidating mill owner Madam Sjödahl (Pernilla August), seen initially firing a newly injured laborer with a month’s pay while he is still babbling at the sight of his pulped hand, and anyone else who benefit from a community who can be bought for a few bottles of the whisky sold by the creepy store owner Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). However, in fairness, Lindmark’s eeriness pales once itinerant painter Beronius appears on the scene (Simon J Berger, delivering an acting turn of exceptional unsettling intensity). While they remain – similar to the clergyman – only a little more than caricatures, they still serve as effective ones.
Narrative Development
Once the foundations of conflict planted, it is time to get down to narrative business. The maid from the doctor’s house, the character Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), duly vanishes from the woods. Signs of her flight and animal scratches on a tree are found but she is nowhere to be seen. Rumours and fears regarding a human-devouring beast roaming the woodland circulate, but the pastor has another theory that he and Jussi set out to verify.
An Odd Beast
To Cook a Bear is a somewhat peculiar show. It conjures a fine sense of the desolation that lets distrust and bias and dark myths thrive from the native legend that bears might be dominated or possessed by the souls of men. And it doesn’t romanticise the hardscrabble life led by the residents, in which brutality, be it from nature or mankind, lurks constantly at the periphery, poised to explode. Yet the personas rarely become beyond symbols – or perhaps, as the struggles amid fairness and vengeance, logic and religion, virtue and wickedness intensify, representative characters within a moral tale – preventing the whole thing truly becoming immersive.
Tonal Inconsistencies
Additionally, there are numerous stylistically clashing moments in which the clergyman’s skill in finding evidence and determine the maid’s destiny turns almost risible. He stands observing broken milk pots and clumps of hair within storage sheds as a fusion of the Belgian detective the English sleuth – with Jussi a rather hapless assistant figure (none of whom were required to taste a blend of blood spatter and the boss’s spit to confirm that indeed, it was clearly coagulated blood on the site), before announcing his latest deduction and extracting a body out of a swamp.
Opposing Goals
The local leaders are bent on demonstrating that the maid met her end by a bear, perhaps to preserve the calm, perhaps to protect a fellow elite. The pastor is bent on establishing the opposite, and the proof so quickly accumulates supporting his view that again the show’s credibility and audience tolerance get strained. At its best, the series evokes memories of the TV version some years back of the author’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the competing allures and fears presented by science and religion. In its low points, it resembles a bear-themed police procedural. Nevertheless, it does seem to offer the answer to that debated question: “Females, choose the animal.”
To Cook a Bear streams on Disney+ currently.
