A intense debate recently spread widely across online platforms, after someone posed the question to women: would you rather be lost in a forest with a man or a bear? Similar to the best thought experiments, it exposed wildly different worldviews and life encounters, illuminated chasms between the sexes, and was likely cause an existential crisis for anyone pondering about it extensively. There was also the predictable coda where men of a certain stripe took to the internet to tell females how foolish they had been for choosing the animal and proceeded to describe 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.
Portraying the Setup
To Cook a Bear effectively dramatises this clever little setup. This six-episode drama is adapted from Swedish author Mikael Niemi’s 2018 novel with the identical title (rendered two years later for an English audience). It traces the struggles of a pastor (the lead actor) and his family when they arrive to start a fresh religious post in Kengis, an isolated settlement in northern Sweden, during the mid-19th century. In a place with few pleasures, none of the inhabitants particularly appreciate his puritanical stance on drinking and dancing, but it is his defense of impoverished people – particularly the indigenous Sami, from which hails the pastor’s foster child the youth Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his conviction in social justice and equality that places him on a collision course against the Kengis local authorities.
The Opposing Forces
Soon in cahoots opposing him include the lawman the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the fearsome mill owner Madam Sjödahl (the actress), seen initially dismissing a newly injured laborer with minimal compensation while he is still babbling upon seeing of his pulped hand, and anyone else who profit from a community easily swayed for a few bottles of liquor provided by the unsettling store owner the merchant Lindmark (the actor). Although, to be fair, Lindmark’s creepiness pales when travelling artist Beronius appears on the scene (the performer, delivering an acting turn of rare discomfiting power). While they remain – like the pastor himself – just slightly beyond than caricatures, they are at least effective ones.
Narrative Development
Once the foundations of conflict sown, it is time to proceed to narrative business. The servant from the doctor’s house, Hilda (the actress), accordingly goes missing from the woods. Indications of her escape and bear markings upon a trunk are found but she is nowhere to be seen. Gossip and anxieties of a man/maid-eating bear prowling the woods spread, but the pastor holds a different view which he and his ward embark to prove.
An Odd Beast
To Cook a Bear is a somewhat odd beast. It conjures a fine sense of the bleakness that allows suspicion and bias and dark myths flourish from the native legend that bears can be controlled or possessed by the souls of men. It avoids idealising the hardscrabble life led by the residents, where brutality, whether that of nature or people, lurks constantly on the edges, poised to explode. But the characters rarely become more than ciphers – or maybe, as the struggles between justice and vengeance, rationality and religion, good and evil intensify, representative characters in a fable – which stops the entire production truly coming to life.
Stylistic Shifts
Additionally, exist the many stylistically clashing instances where the clergyman’s skill in finding evidence and discern Hilda’s fate turns nearly laughable. He stands observing shattered containers and clumps of hair in hay barns like a combined Hercule Poirot the English sleuth – with Jussi a particularly unfortunate Hastings-cum-Watson (neither of whom were required to taste a blend of blood droplets and the boss’s spit to agree that, yes, it was clearly coagulated blood at the crime scene), prior to declaring his newest conclusion and extracting a corpse out of a swamp.
Opposing Goals
The village elite are bent on proving that the maid met her end by an animal, maybe to protect the peace, perhaps to protect one of their own. The clergyman is bent on establishing otherwise, and the proof so quickly accumulates supporting his view that once more the drama’s plausibility and the viewer’s patience are tested. In its finest moments, the series evokes memories of the adaptation a few years ago of Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the competing allures and terrors offered by rational thought and religion. In its low points, it’s more like Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Nevertheless, it does seem to offer the answer to that debated question: “Ladies, take the bear.”
To Cook a Bear is on Disney+ now.
