A heated debate lately spread widely on social media, after someone asked a query to women: would you rather be lost in a forest alongside a male or a bear? Like all the most engaging hypothetical scenarios, it revealed vastly opposing worldviews and life encounters, illuminated divides between the sexes, 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 took to the internet to inform females how stupid they had been for choosing the bear and proceeded to describe the consequences they merited for it. This at minimum allowed those females who had been hesitating over their choice to decide with renewed assurance.
Portraying the Scenario
To Cook a Bear skillfully brings to life this clever small premise. This six-episode series is adapted 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 pastor (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his family as they come to begin a fresh religious post in Kengis, an isolated settlement in northern Sweden, in 1852. Within a community with few pleasures, not one of the inhabitants especially appreciate his puritanical approach to alcohol and dancing, yet it is his protection of impoverished people – particularly the indigenous Sami, from among whom 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 Antagonists
Soon in cahoots against him are the lawman Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the intimidating mill owner Madam Sjödahl (Pernilla August), observed early on firing a newly injured worker with a month’s pay as he remains gibbering at the sight his crushed hand, and all others who profit from a community easily swayed with some containers of liquor provided by the creepy shopkeeper Lindmark (the actor). Although, to be fair, Lindmark’s eeriness pales when travelling artist the artist Beronius appears on the scene (the performer, delivering an acting turn of exceptional discomfiting power). If they are – similar to the clergyman – only a little more being stereotypes, they are at least effective ones.
Plot Progression
Once the foundations of tension sown, it is time to proceed with the storyline. The servant employed by the doctor, Hilda (the actress), duly goes missing from the woods. Signs of her escape and bear markings upon a trunk get discovered yet she remains completely absent. Gossip and fears regarding a human-devouring bear roaming the woods spread, yet the clergyman has another theory that he and Jussi embark to prove.
A Strange Creation
This Bear Drama is a somewhat peculiar show. It conjures a fine sense of the desolation that lets distrust and prejudice and dark myths thrive from the native legend that bears might be dominated or inhabited by the spirits of men. And it doesn’t idealising the hardscrabble life experienced by the residents, in which violence, be it from the wild or people, lurks constantly on the edges, waiting to erupt. But the characters seldom evolve more than ciphers – or maybe, while the conflicts amid fairness and vengeance, logic and religion, good and evil intensify, emblematic figures within a moral tale – which stops the whole thing fully coming to life.
Tonal Inconsistencies
Additionally, exist the many tonally jarring instances in which the clergyman’s skill to discover clues and discern the maid’s destiny turns almost risible. He positions himself observing broken milk pots and strands of fur in hay barns like a combined Hercule Poirot and Sherlock Holmes – with Jussi a particularly unfortunate Hastings-cum-Watson (neither of whom had to taste a mixture of blood spatter and the boss’s spit to agree that indeed, it was definitely coagulated blood on the site), before announcing his latest deduction and pulling a corpse from a bog.
Clashing Agendas
The village elite are determined demonstrating that the maid met her end by a bear, perhaps to preserve the peace, or possibly to shield a fellow elite. The pastor is intent on establishing otherwise, and the evidence so rapidly stacks up in his favour that again the drama’s plausibility and audience tolerance are tested. At its best, To Cook a Bear evokes memories of the TV version some years back of Sarah Perry’s the serpent tale, with its evocation of the opposing attractions and fears offered by rational thought and religion. In its low points, it’s more like a bear-themed police procedural. Still, it does seem to provide the answer to that debated question: “Females, choose the animal.”
The series is on Disney+ currently.
