A intense discussion recently spread widely across online platforms, following someone posed the question for females: which would you prefer find yourself stranded in a forest alongside a male or with a bear? Similar to the best hypothetical scenarios, it exposed wildly different worldviews and experiences, illuminated chasms among genders, and could easily cause a deep personal dilemma if you thought about it extensively. Additionally, there came the almost inevitable follow-up where some males took to the internet to inform females how stupid they had been for choosing the bear and proceeded to describe the punishments they deserved for that choice. This at minimum allowed the women who were uncertain about their decision to decide with renewed assurance.
Dramatising the Scenario
To Cook a Bear skillfully dramatises this clever small premise. This six-episode drama is based on Swedish author Mikael Niemi’s 2018 book of the same name (translated two years later for an English audience). It traces the struggles of a clergyman (the lead actor) and his family when they arrive to start a new ministry within Kengis, a remote village in northern Sweden, during the mid-19th century. Within a community with few pleasures, not one of the locals especially warm to his puritanical approach to drinking and dancing, yet it is his protection of the poor – especially the native Sami population, from which comes the preacher’s adopted son Jussi (the young actor) – and his conviction in societal fairness and equality that sets him on a collision course against the Kengis powers that be.
The Opposing Forces
Quickly in cahoots against him include the lawman the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the fearsome factory proprietor the matron Sjödahl (the actress), observed initially dismissing a recently mangled worker with minimal compensation as he remains gibbering upon seeing his crushed hand, and anyone else who benefit from a community who can be bought for a few bottles of the whisky sold by the unsettling store owner the merchant Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s creepiness diminishes once travelling artist Beronius appears on the scene (the performer, providing an acting turn of exceptional discomfiting power). While they remain – similar to the clergyman – only a little more than caricatures, they are at least potent archetypes.
Plot Progression
With the seeds of conflict sown, the moment arrives to proceed to narrative business. The servant employed by the doctor, Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), duly goes missing in the forest. Signs of her flight and animal scratches on a tree are found but she is completely absent. Gossip and anxieties of a man/maid-eating bear prowling the woodland circulate, yet the clergyman has another theory which he and his ward set out to verify.
A Strange Creation
To Cook a Bear is a slightly peculiar show. It creates a fine sense of the bleakness that allows distrust and prejudice and grim legends thrive from the native legend that animals can be controlled or possessed by the souls of humans. It avoids romanticise the tough existence experienced by the residents, in which violence, be it from the wild or people, always looms at the periphery, waiting to erupt. Yet the personas seldom evolve beyond symbols – or perhaps, as the struggles between justice and vengeance, logic and faith, virtue and evil escalate, representative characters within a moral tale – which stops the whole thing truly coming to life.
Stylistic Shifts
Additionally, there are the many tonally jarring instances in which the clergyman’s skill to discover clues and discern the maid’s destiny becomes nearly laughable. He stands looking at broken milk pots and strands of fur in hay barns as a fusion of the Belgian detective the English sleuth – with Jussi a rather hapless assistant figure (neither of whom were required to lick a mixture of blood spatter and the boss’s spit to agree that, yes, it was clearly coagulated blood at the crime scene), prior to declaring his latest deduction and extracting a body out of a swamp.
Opposing Goals
The local leaders are bent on demonstrating that the maid met her end by an animal, perhaps to protect the peace, or possibly to shield a fellow elite. The pastor is intent on proving the opposite, and the proof so rapidly stacks up supporting his view that once more the drama’s plausibility and audience tolerance get strained. In its finest moments, To Cook a Bear evokes memories of the adaptation a few years ago of Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, through its portrayal of the opposing attractions and terrors offered by science and religion. In its low points, it’s more like a bear-themed police procedural. Still, it appears to provide the answer to that debated question: “Females, choose the animal.”
To Cook a Bear is on Disney+ currently.
