A heated debate lately spread widely across online platforms, following someone posed a query for females: would you rather be lost in the woods alongside a male or a bear? Like all the most engaging thought experiments, it exposed vastly opposing worldviews and life encounters, highlighted chasms among genders, and could easily cause an existential crisis if you thought on it for too long. Additionally, there came the almost inevitable follow-up in which some males took to the internet to tell women how stupid they were to select the animal and proceeded to describe the consequences they deserved for that choice. This at least enabled the women who were uncertain over their choice to make it with a new confidence.
Dramatising the Scenario
To Cook a Bear effectively brings to life this nifty little setup. This six-episode drama is adapted from Swedish author Mikael Niemi’s 2018 novel with the identical title (translated in 2020 for English readers). It follows the struggles of a clergyman (the lead actor) and his family as they come to begin a new ministry within Kengis, a remote settlement in northern Sweden, in 1852. Within a community lacking many joys, not one of the inhabitants particularly warm to his puritanical stance on alcohol and dancing, but it is his protection of impoverished people – particularly the native Sami population, from which hails the preacher’s adopted son Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in social justice and equality that places him in direct opposition against the Kengis local authorities.
The Opposing Forces
Soon collaborating against him are the lawman the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the intimidating factory proprietor Madam Sjödahl (Pernilla August), seen early on firing a recently mangled worker with a month’s pay as he remains gibbering upon seeing his crushed hand, and all others who profit from a populace who can be bought for a few bottles of liquor provided by the creepy store owner the merchant Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). Although, to be fair, Lindmark’s creepiness pales when travelling artist the artist Beronius appears in the story (Simon J Berger, delivering an acting turn of rare unsettling intensity). If they are – similar to the clergyman – only a little more than caricatures, they still serve as effective ones.
Plot Progression
With the seeds of tension sown, it is time to get down with the storyline. The maid employed by the doctor, the character Hilda (the actress), duly vanishes from the woods. Indications of her flight and bear markings on a tree are found yet she remains nowhere to be seen. Gossip and fears regarding a human-devouring bear roaming the woodland circulate, but the pastor holds a different view which he and his ward set out to prove.
An Odd Beast
To Cook a Bear is a somewhat peculiar show. It creates a fine sense of the desolation that lets suspicion and prejudice and dark myths flourish from the native legend that animals can be controlled or possessed by the souls of humans. And it doesn’t romanticise the tough existence experienced by the villagers, where violence, whether that of nature or people, lurks constantly on the edges, poised to explode. Yet the personas rarely become beyond symbols – or maybe, as the struggles between justice and vengeance, logic and faith, virtue and wickedness intensify, emblematic figures in a fable – which stops the whole thing truly becoming immersive.
Stylistic Shifts
And then, exist numerous stylistically clashing instances in which the pastor’s ability to discover clues and discern Hilda’s fate turns nearly laughable. He positions himself observing shattered containers and clumps of hair in hay barns like a combined Hercule Poirot and Sherlock Holmes – with Jussi a particularly unfortunate Hastings-cum-Watson (none of whom were required to lick a mixture of blood spatter and saliva from his superior to confirm that, yes, it was clearly dried blood on the site), before announcing his newest conclusion and pulling a corpse from a bog.
Opposing Goals
The village elite are bent on proving that Hilda met her end by an animal, perhaps to preserve the calm, perhaps to shield one of their own. The pastor is intent on establishing the opposite, and the proof so rapidly accumulates in his favour that once more the show’s credibility and audience tolerance get strained. At its best, To Cook a Bear evokes memories of the adaptation some years back of the author’s the serpent tale, with its evocation of the opposing allures and fears offered by rational thought and religion. At its worst, it’s more like Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Nevertheless, it appears to provide the answer to that debated question: “Females, choose the animal.”
The series streams on Disney+ currently.
