An heated debate lately spread widely across online platforms, after someone posed the question for females: which would you prefer find yourself stranded in a forest alongside a male or with a bear? Similar to the most engaging hypothetical scenarios, it exposed wildly different worldviews and life encounters, illuminated divides among genders, and could easily cause an existential crisis for anyone pondering about it extensively. Additionally, there came the almost inevitable coda where men of a certain stripe took to the internet to tell females how foolish they had been for choosing the bear and went on to describe the consequences they merited for it. This at least allowed those females who were uncertain about their decision to make it with renewed assurance.
Dramatising the Setup
To Cook a Bear skillfully brings to life this clever small premise. The six-part drama is based on Swedish author Mikael Niemi’s 2018 book of the same name (rendered two years later for English readers). It traces the struggles of a clergyman (the lead actor) and his household when they arrive to start a fresh religious post in Kengis, a remote settlement in Sweden’s north, in 1852. Within a community lacking many joys, none of the inhabitants particularly warm to his puritanical stance on drinking and dancing, but it is his protection of impoverished people – particularly the indigenous Sami, from which comes the preacher’s foster child the youth Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in societal fairness and equal rights that places him in direct opposition with the Kengis local authorities.
The Antagonists
Soon collaborating against him include the lawman Brahe (the performer), the fearsome factory proprietor the matron Sjödahl (the actress), seen early on firing a newly injured worker with minimal compensation while he is still gibbering at the sight his crushed hand, and all others who profit from a populace easily swayed with some containers of liquor sold by the unsettling shopkeeper Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s eeriness pales once travelling artist the artist Beronius appears in the story (the performer, providing an acting turn of exceptional unsettling intensity). If they are – like the pastor himself – only a little more being stereotypes, they are at least potent archetypes.
Plot Progression
With the seeds of tension sown, the moment arrives to get down to narrative business. The maid employed by the doctor, the character Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), accordingly goes missing in the forest. Signs of her escape and bear markings on a tree are found but she is completely absent. Gossip and anxieties of a man/maid-eating bear prowling the woodland spread, yet the clergyman holds a different view that he and Jussi embark to verify.
An Odd Beast
To Cook a Bear is a slightly odd beast. It creates a fine sense of the bleakness that allows distrust and bias and dark myths thrive based on local folklore that animals can be controlled or inhabited by the souls of men. And it doesn’t romanticise the tough existence led by the residents, where brutality, be it from the wild or mankind, always looms on the edges, waiting to erupt. Yet the personas rarely become more than ciphers – or perhaps, while the conflicts amid fairness and revenge, rationality and faith, good and wickedness escalate, emblematic figures within a moral tale – preventing the entire production truly coming to life.
Tonal Inconsistencies
And then, there are numerous tonally jarring instances where the pastor’s ability in finding evidence and determine the maid’s destiny turns almost risible. He stands looking at broken milk pots and strands of fur in hay barns like a combined Hercule Poirot the English sleuth – with Jussi a particularly unfortunate assistant figure (neither of whom were required to lick a blend of blood droplets and saliva from his superior to confirm that indeed, it was clearly coagulated blood at the crime scene), before announcing his latest deduction and extracting a corpse out of a swamp.
Opposing Goals
The village elite are determined demonstrating that the maid met her end by a bear, perhaps to preserve the peace, perhaps to shield one of their own. The clergyman is bent on establishing otherwise, and the evidence so quickly accumulates in his favour that again the drama’s plausibility and the viewer’s patience are tested. In its finest moments, the series evokes memories of the TV version a few years ago of Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, through its portrayal of the competing allures and fears presented by science and religion. In its low points, it’s more like Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Still, it appears to provide the response to the earlier query: “Females, choose the animal.”
To Cook a Bear streams on Disney+ currently.
