An intense debate lately spread widely across online platforms, after a user asked a query to women: which would you prefer be lost in a forest alongside a male or with a bear? Similar to the best hypothetical scenarios, it exposed wildly different worldviews and experiences, illuminated divides between the sexes, and was likely cause a deep personal dilemma if you thought about it extensively. Additionally, there came the almost inevitable coda in which some males took to the internet to inform women how stupid they had been to select the animal and proceeded to limn the punishments they merited for that choice. This at least enabled those females who were uncertain over their choice to make it with a new confidence.
Portraying the Scenario
To Cook a Bear effectively brings to life this clever little setup. This six-episode drama is based from Swedish author Mikael Niemi’s 2018 novel of the same name (translated in 2020 for an English audience). It traces the tribulations of a clergyman (the lead actor) and his household when they arrive to start a fresh religious post in Kengis, a remote settlement in Sweden’s north, during the mid-19th century. Within a community with few pleasures, not one of the locals particularly appreciate his puritanical approach to drinking and revelry, but it is his protection of the poor – particularly the indigenous Sami, from among whom comes the preacher’s adopted son Jussi (the young actor) – and his conviction in societal fairness and equal rights that sets him on a collision course against the Kengis powers that be.
The Opposing Forces
Soon in cahoots opposing him are the lawman Brahe (the performer), the fearsome factory proprietor Madam Sjödahl (Pernilla August), seen early on dismissing a newly injured worker with minimal compensation as he remains babbling at the sight his crushed hand, and anyone else who profit from a community who can be bought for a few bottles of liquor sold by the creepy store owner Lindmark (the actor). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s creepiness diminishes once itinerant painter the artist Beronius arrives on the scene (Simon J Berger, delivering an acting turn of exceptional unsettling intensity). If they are – similar to the clergyman – only a little more being stereotypes, they are at least effective ones.
Narrative Development
With the seeds of conflict sown, it is time to get down with the storyline. The maid from the doctor’s house, the character Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), duly vanishes in the forest. Signs of her flight and animal scratches upon a trunk are found but she is nowhere to be seen. Rumours and fears of a man/maid-eating beast prowling the woodland spread, yet the clergyman holds a different view that he and Jussi embark to verify.
A Strange Creation
To Cook a Bear is a slightly peculiar show. It creates a fine sense of the bleakness that lets distrust and bias and grim legends flourish from the native legend that bears can be controlled or inhabited by the souls of humans. And it doesn’t romanticise the hardscrabble life led by the residents, where brutality, whether that of nature or people, lurks constantly at the periphery, poised to explode. Yet the personas rarely become beyond symbols – or perhaps, while the conflicts between justice and revenge, rationality and religion, virtue and wickedness intensify, emblematic figures within a moral tale – preventing the entire production fully becoming immersive.
Tonal Inconsistencies
And then, there are the many tonally jarring moments where the clergyman’s skill to discover clues and discern the maid’s destiny turns almost risible. He stands observing shattered containers and clumps of hair within storage sheds like a combined the Belgian detective and Sherlock Holmes – with Jussi a particularly unfortunate assistant figure (neither of whom had to lick a mixture of blood droplets and the boss’s spit to confirm that indeed, it was clearly coagulated blood at the crime scene), before announcing his newest conclusion and pulling a corpse from a bog.
Clashing Agendas
The village elite are bent on demonstrating that Hilda met her end by a bear, perhaps to preserve the peace, perhaps to protect a fellow elite. The clergyman is intent on establishing the opposite, and the proof so rapidly accumulates supporting his view that once more the drama’s plausibility and audience tolerance are tested. At its best, the series evokes memories of the TV version some years back of the author’s the serpent tale, through its portrayal of the opposing allures and fears offered by science and belief. At its worst, it resembles a bear-themed police procedural. Still, it appears to provide the answer to that debated question: “Ladies, take the bear.”
To Cook a Bear streams on Disney+ currently.
