An heated discussion recently spread widely across online platforms, following someone posed a query for females: would you rather be lost in a forest with a man or with a bear? Similar to the best thought experiments, it revealed wildly different worldviews and life encounters, highlighted chasms among genders, and was likely cause an existential crisis if you thought about it extensively. Additionally, there came the almost inevitable follow-up where men of a certain stripe came online to inform women how stupid they were to select the animal and went on to limn the consequences they deserved for it. This at least enabled those females who had been hesitating about their decision to decide with a new confidence.
Portraying the Setup
To Cook a Bear skillfully dramatises this clever little setup. The six-part series is based from Scandinavian writer Mikael Niemi’s 2018 novel with the identical title (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 within Kengis, an isolated settlement in northern Sweden, in 1852. In a place lacking many joys, not one of the inhabitants particularly appreciate his strict approach to drinking and dancing, but it is his defense of the poor – particularly the indigenous Sami, from among whom hails the pastor’s foster child Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in social justice and equal rights that places him on a collision course with the Kengis powers that be.
The Antagonists
Soon in cahoots opposing him include the lawman the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the intimidating mill owner Madam Sjödahl (Pernilla August), observed early on firing a recently mangled laborer with a month’s pay while he is still gibbering upon seeing his crushed hand, and all others who benefit from a populace who can be bought for a few bottles of the whisky provided by the unsettling store owner the merchant Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). Although, to be fair, Lindmark’s creepiness pales when travelling artist Beronius appears on the scene (Simon J Berger, delivering a performance of exceptional discomfiting power). If they are – similar to the clergyman – only a little more than caricatures, they still serve as potent archetypes.
Plot Progression
Once the foundations of tension sown, it is time to get down with the storyline. The maid employed by the doctor, the character Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), accordingly vanishes in the forest. Signs of her flight and animal scratches on a tree are found but she is completely absent. Rumours and anxieties of a man/maid-eating bear prowling the woodland spread, but the pastor holds a different view that he and Jussi embark to verify.
A Strange Creation
To Cook a Bear is a slightly peculiar show. It conjures a fine sense of the desolation that allows suspicion and bias and grim legends flourish from the native legend that animals can be controlled or possessed by the souls of men. It avoids idealising the hardscrabble life experienced by the residents, in which violence, whether that of nature or people, lurks constantly at the periphery, waiting to erupt. But the characters seldom evolve beyond symbols – or perhaps, as the struggles between justice and vengeance, rationality and religion, good and wickedness escalate, representative characters within a moral tale – preventing the entire production truly becoming immersive.
Stylistic Shifts
Additionally, there are numerous tonally jarring instances in which the pastor’s ability to discover clues and discern the maid’s destiny turns almost risible. He stands observing broken milk pots and strands of fur within storage sheds like a combined Hercule Poirot the English sleuth – with Jussi a rather hapless Hastings-cum-Watson (neither of whom had to lick a blend of blood spatter and saliva from his superior to agree that indeed, it was clearly dried blood at the crime scene), before announcing his newest conclusion and extracting a corpse from a bog.
Clashing Agendas
The village elite are bent on demonstrating that Hilda met her end by an animal, maybe to protect the calm, perhaps to protect one of their own. The pastor is bent on proving otherwise, and the proof so rapidly accumulates supporting his view that again the drama’s plausibility and the viewer’s patience get strained. In its finest moments, the series evokes memories of the adaptation a few years ago of the author’s The Essex Serpent, through its portrayal of the opposing attractions and terrors offered by science and religion. At its worst, it resembles Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Nevertheless, it appears to offer the response to the earlier query: “Ladies, take the bear.”
The series streams on Disney+ now.
