A intense debate recently spread widely across online platforms, after a user asked a query to women: would you rather be lost in a forest with a man or with a bear? Like all the best hypothetical scenarios, it revealed wildly different worldviews and life encounters, highlighted divides among genders, and was likely cause an existential crisis if you thought about it extensively. There was also the predictable follow-up where men of a certain stripe took to the internet to inform women how foolish they were to select the animal and proceeded to limn the consequences they merited for it. This at minimum allowed the women who were uncertain about their decision to decide with a new confidence.
Dramatising the Setup
To Cook a Bear effectively dramatises this nifty little setup. The six-part drama is adapted on Scandinavian writer Mikael Niemi’s 2018 novel of the same name (translated in 2020 for an English audience). It traces the struggles of a clergyman (the lead actor) and his family when they arrive to begin a fresh religious post within Kengis, a remote village in Sweden’s north, during the mid-19th century. In a place with few pleasures, not one of the locals especially warm to his strict stance on drinking and dancing, but it is his protection of impoverished people – particularly the indigenous Sami, from which hails the pastor’s foster child the youth Jussi (the young actor) – and his belief in societal fairness and equality that places him in direct opposition against the Kengis local authorities.
The Antagonists
Quickly in cahoots against him include the lawman the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the fearsome factory proprietor the matron Sjödahl (the actress), observed initially dismissing a newly injured worker 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 the whisky sold by the creepy shopkeeper Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). However, in fairness, Lindmark’s creepiness pales once travelling artist the artist Beronius arrives on the scene (the performer, providing a performance of exceptional unsettling intensity). If they are – like the pastor himself – just slightly beyond being stereotypes, they are at least potent archetypes.
Narrative Development
Once the foundations of conflict sown, it is time to get down to narrative business. The servant employed by the doctor, Hilda (the actress), duly vanishes in the forest. Indications of her escape and bear markings on a tree get discovered but she is completely absent. Gossip and fears of a man/maid-eating beast roaming the woodland spread, but the pastor holds a different view that he and Jussi embark to verify.
An Odd Beast
To Cook a Bear is a slightly peculiar show. It creates a strong impression of the bleakness that allows suspicion and prejudice and dark myths thrive from the native legend that bears can be controlled or inhabited by the spirits of humans. And it doesn’t idealising the hardscrabble life led by the residents, where violence, whether that of nature or people, always looms on the edges, poised to explode. But the characters rarely become more than ciphers – or maybe, while the conflicts amid fairness and revenge, rationality and religion, good and wickedness intensify, emblematic figures within a moral tale – preventing the whole thing fully becoming immersive.
Stylistic Shifts
Additionally, exist the many stylistically clashing moments in which the clergyman’s skill to discover clues and discern the maid’s destiny becomes almost risible. He positions himself observing shattered containers and clumps of hair in hay barns like a combined the Belgian detective the English sleuth – with Jussi a particularly unfortunate assistant figure (neither of whom were required to lick a mixture of blood droplets and the boss’s spit to agree that indeed, it was definitely dried blood at the crime scene), prior to declaring his newest conclusion and pulling a corpse out of a swamp.
Opposing Goals
The local leaders are determined demonstrating that Hilda met her end by an animal, maybe to protect the peace, perhaps to protect one of their own. The clergyman is intent on proving otherwise, and the proof so rapidly stacks up in his favour that once more the drama’s plausibility and audience tolerance get strained. In its finest moments, To Cook a Bear is reminiscent of the TV version some years back of the author’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the competing attractions and terrors offered by rational thought and religion. In its low points, it resembles Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Nevertheless, it does seem to provide the answer to the earlier query: “Females, choose the animal.”
The series is on Disney+ currently.
