A heated debate lately spread widely across online platforms, after a user asked a query for females: which would you prefer be lost in the woods alongside a male or with a bear? Similar to the most engaging thought experiments, it exposed wildly different perspectives and life encounters, illuminated chasms between the sexes, and could easily cause an existential crisis for anyone pondering about it for too long. There was also the almost inevitable follow-up where men of a certain stripe came online to inform females how foolish they were to select the animal and proceeded to describe the punishments they deserved for that choice. This at least enabled those females who were uncertain over their choice to make it with renewed assurance.
Portraying the Scenario
To Cook a Bear effectively dramatises this clever small premise. This six-episode series is based on Swedish author Mikael Niemi’s 2018 book of the same name (translated in 2020 for an English audience). It traces the struggles of a pastor (the lead actor) and his family when they arrive to start a fresh religious post within Kengis, a remote settlement in northern Sweden, in 1852. Within a community lacking many joys, not one of the inhabitants especially warm to his strict approach to drinking and revelry, yet it is his defense of the poor – particularly the indigenous Sami, from which hails the pastor’s foster child the youth Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in social justice and equality that places him in direct opposition against the Kengis powers that be.
The Opposing Forces
Quickly in cahoots opposing him include the lawman Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the fearsome mill owner Madam Sjödahl (Pernilla August), seen 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 profit from a community easily swayed for a few bottles of liquor provided by the creepy store owner Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). However, in fairness, Lindmark’s eeriness diminishes when itinerant painter the artist Beronius arrives in the story (the performer, delivering a performance of rare unsettling intensity). While they remain – similar to the clergyman – just slightly beyond than caricatures, they are at least potent archetypes.
Narrative Development
With the seeds of tension planted, it is time to get down with the storyline. The servant employed by the doctor, the character Hilda (the actress), duly vanishes in the forest. Signs of her flight and bear markings on a tree get discovered but she is nowhere to be seen. Gossip and anxieties of a man/maid-eating beast roaming the woods spread, but the pastor has another theory that he and Jussi set out to verify.
A Strange Creation
To Cook a Bear is a slightly odd beast. It conjures a strong impression of the desolation that lets suspicion and prejudice and grim legends thrive from the native legend that animals might be dominated or inhabited by the spirits of men. It avoids romanticise the hardscrabble life led by the residents, where violence, whether that of nature or mankind, always looms at the periphery, waiting to erupt. Yet the personas seldom evolve beyond symbols – or perhaps, as the struggles between justice and vengeance, rationality and faith, good and wickedness intensify, emblematic figures in a fable – which stops the entire production fully coming to life.
Stylistic Shifts
And then, 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 looking at shattered containers and strands of fur in hay barns like a combined Hercule Poirot the English sleuth – alongside Jussi a particularly unfortunate assistant figure (none of whom had to lick a blend of blood spatter and saliva from his superior to confirm that, yes, it was clearly coagulated blood at the crime scene), prior to declaring his newest conclusion and extracting a body from a bog.
Opposing Goals
The local leaders are determined demonstrating that Hilda met her end by an animal, maybe to preserve the calm, perhaps to protect one of their own. The pastor is intent on proving the opposite, and the evidence so rapidly accumulates in his favour that again the drama’s plausibility and audience tolerance get strained. At its best, To Cook a Bear evokes memories of the TV version a few years ago of Sarah Perry’s the serpent tale, with its evocation of the competing allures and fears presented by rational thought and religion. In its low points, it’s more like Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Nevertheless, it does seem to provide the answer to that debated question: “Females, choose the animal.”
To Cook a Bear streams on Disney+ now.
