An intense debate lately spread widely across online platforms, following a user posed a query to women: which would you prefer be lost in a forest alongside a male or a bear? Similar to the best thought experiments, it exposed wildly different worldviews and life encounters, illuminated chasms among genders, and was likely to induce a deep personal dilemma if you thought on it for too long. There was also the almost inevitable follow-up where men of a certain stripe came online to inform women how stupid they were for choosing the bear and proceeded to limn the punishments they merited for that choice. This at minimum allowed those females who had been hesitating about their decision to make it with renewed assurance.
Portraying the Scenario
To Cook a Bear effectively brings to life this nifty little setup. This six-episode series is based from Swedish author Mikael Niemi’s 2018 book of the same name (translated two years later for an English audience). It follows the tribulations of a clergyman (the lead actor) and his household when they arrive to start a new ministry in Kengis, a remote village in northern Sweden, in 1852. In a place with few pleasures, none of the inhabitants particularly warm to his puritanical stance on drinking and dancing, but it is his defense of impoverished people – particularly the indigenous Sami, from which hails the preacher’s foster child Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in social justice and equality that places him in direct opposition with the Kengis local authorities.
The Opposing Forces
Soon in cahoots against him are the lawman the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the fearsome factory proprietor the matron Sjödahl (the actress), observed initially firing a recently mangled worker with minimal compensation while he is still gibbering at the sight his crushed hand, and anyone else who benefit from a community easily swayed for a few bottles of liquor sold by the creepy shopkeeper Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). However, in fairness, Lindmark’s eeriness diminishes once itinerant painter the artist Beronius appears in the story (the performer, delivering a performance of exceptional unsettling intensity). If they are – like the pastor himself – only a little more than caricatures, they are at least potent archetypes.
Plot Progression
Once the foundations of conflict planted, it is time to proceed to narrative business. The servant employed by the doctor, the character Hilda (the actress), duly goes missing in the forest. Signs of her flight and animal scratches upon a trunk get discovered but she is nowhere to be seen. Rumours and anxieties regarding a human-devouring bear roaming the woods circulate, but the pastor has another theory that he and Jussi set out to verify.
An Odd Beast
This Bear Drama is a slightly peculiar show. It creates a fine sense of the bleakness that lets distrust and prejudice and grim legends flourish from the native legend that bears might be dominated or inhabited by the souls of humans. And it doesn’t romanticise the hardscrabble life led by the villagers, in which brutality, whether that of the wild or people, always looms on the edges, waiting to erupt. Yet the personas seldom evolve beyond symbols – or perhaps, as the struggles between justice and vengeance, logic and faith, good and wickedness intensify, emblematic figures within a moral tale – which stops the whole thing fully coming to life.
Stylistic Shifts
Additionally, exist numerous tonally jarring moments in which the pastor’s ability in finding evidence and determine the maid’s destiny becomes almost risible. He stands observing broken milk pots and clumps of hair in hay barns like a combined Hercule Poirot and Sherlock Holmes – with Jussi a rather hapless assistant figure (none of whom had to lick a mixture of blood droplets and the boss’s spit to confirm that, yes, it was clearly coagulated blood at the crime scene), prior to declaring his newest conclusion and extracting a corpse from a bog.
Opposing Goals
The village elite are determined proving that the maid was killed by a bear, maybe to preserve the calm, perhaps to protect one of their own. The pastor is intent on proving the opposite, and the proof so rapidly stacks up supporting his view that again the drama’s plausibility and the viewer’s patience are tested. In its finest moments, the series is reminiscent of the adaptation a few years ago of the author’s the serpent tale, with its evocation of the opposing allures and terrors presented by rational thought and religion. At its worst, it’s more like a bear-themed police procedural. Still, it does seem to offer the answer to the earlier query: “Females, choose the animal.”
The series streams on Disney+ now.
