An heated debate lately went viral on social media, following a user asked a query for females: which would you prefer be lost in a forest with a man or a bear? Similar to the most engaging thought experiments, it revealed wildly different perspectives and life encounters, illuminated chasms among genders, and could easily to induce an existential crisis for anyone pondering about it for too long. Additionally, there came the predictable follow-up where men of a certain stripe took to the internet to tell women how foolish they had been for choosing the animal and went on to describe the punishments they deserved for that choice. This at minimum enabled the women who had been hesitating about their decision to make it with renewed assurance.
Portraying the Scenario
To Cook a Bear skillfully dramatises this nifty small premise. This six-episode drama is based from Swedish author Mikael Niemi’s 2018 book of the same name (rendered in 2020 for an English audience). It follows the tribulations of a clergyman (the lead actor) and his family when they arrive to start a new ministry in Kengis, a remote settlement in Sweden’s north, in 1852. Within a community with few pleasures, none of the inhabitants particularly appreciate his puritanical approach to drinking and dancing, yet it is his defense of the poor – especially the native Sami population, from which hails the preacher’s adopted son the youth Jussi (the young actor) – and his conviction in social justice and equality that places him in direct opposition with the Kengis local authorities.
The Antagonists
Quickly collaborating opposing him are the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the fearsome factory proprietor the matron Sjödahl (the actress), observed early on firing a newly injured laborer with a month’s pay as he remains gibbering upon seeing his crushed hand, and all others who benefit from a community who can be bought for a few bottles of liquor sold by the creepy shopkeeper Lindmark (the actor). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s eeriness diminishes when itinerant painter the artist Beronius appears on the scene (the performer, delivering a performance of exceptional unsettling intensity). If they are – similar to the clergyman – only a little more than caricatures, they still serve as potent archetypes.
Narrative Development
Once the foundations of conflict sown, the moment arrives to get down with the storyline. The servant employed by the doctor, Hilda (the actress), duly vanishes from the woods. Indications of her escape and bear markings on a tree get discovered but she is nowhere to be seen. Rumours and anxieties regarding a human-devouring beast prowling the woodland spread, yet the clergyman holds a different view that he and Jussi embark to prove.
A Strange Creation
To Cook a Bear is a somewhat odd beast. It creates a fine sense of the bleakness that lets suspicion and bias and grim legends flourish from the native legend that bears can be controlled or inhabited by the souls of men. It avoids romanticise the tough existence experienced by the villagers, in which brutality, be it from nature or mankind, lurks constantly at the periphery, waiting to erupt. Yet the personas rarely become beyond symbols – or perhaps, as the struggles between justice and vengeance, logic and religion, virtue and wickedness escalate, representative characters within a moral tale – preventing the entire production fully becoming immersive.
Stylistic Shifts
Additionally, there are the many stylistically clashing moments in which the clergyman’s skill to discover clues and determine Hilda’s fate becomes nearly laughable. He stands observing broken milk pots and clumps of hair in hay barns as a fusion of the Belgian detective the English sleuth – alongside Jussi a rather hapless assistant figure (neither of whom were required to taste a mixture of blood droplets and saliva from his superior to agree that indeed, it was clearly dried blood at the crime scene), before announcing his latest deduction and pulling a body from a bog.
Opposing Goals
The village elite are determined proving that the maid met her end by a bear, perhaps to protect the calm, perhaps to protect one of their own. The pastor is bent on proving the opposite, and the evidence so rapidly accumulates in his favour that once more the drama’s plausibility and audience tolerance get strained. In its finest moments, the series evokes memories of the TV version a few years ago of Sarah Perry’s the serpent tale, with its evocation of the competing attractions and terrors presented by rational thought and belief. At its worst, it resembles a bear-themed police procedural. Nevertheless, it does seem to provide the answer to that debated question: “Females, choose the animal.”
To Cook a Bear is on Disney+ currently.
