A intense debate recently went viral across online platforms, following someone posed the question to women: would you rather be lost in a forest with a man or with a bear? Like all the most engaging hypothetical scenarios, it revealed wildly different worldviews and life encounters, illuminated chasms between the sexes, and could easily cause an existential crisis for anyone pondering on it extensively. There was also the almost inevitable follow-up in which some males came online to inform females how foolish they had been to select the animal and went on to describe the consequences they merited for that choice. This at minimum allowed those females who were uncertain about their decision to decide with renewed assurance.
Dramatising the Scenario
To Cook a Bear skillfully dramatises this nifty small premise. The six-part series is based from Swedish author Mikael Niemi’s 2018 book with the identical title (translated in 2020 for an English audience). It follows the tribulations of a pastor (the lead actor) and his family as they come to start a fresh religious post within Kengis, a remote settlement in northern Sweden, in 1852. In a place lacking many joys, none of the inhabitants especially warm to his puritanical approach to alcohol and dancing, but it is his protection of impoverished people – especially the indigenous Sami, from which hails the pastor’s adopted son the youth Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his conviction in social justice and equality that places him on a collision course with the Kengis local authorities.
The Opposing Forces
Quickly collaborating opposing him are the sheriff the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the intimidating mill owner Madam Sjödahl (the actress), seen initially firing a newly injured laborer with minimal compensation as he remains babbling at the sight his crushed hand, and anyone else who benefit from a populace who can be bought for a few bottles of the whisky sold by the creepy shopkeeper Lindmark (the actor). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s eeriness pales once itinerant painter Beronius arrives in the story (Simon J Berger, providing an acting turn of exceptional unsettling intensity). If they are – similar to the clergyman – only a little more than caricatures, they are at least effective ones.
Plot Progression
With the seeds of conflict planted, it is time to get down to narrative business. The maid from the doctor’s house, the character Hilda (the actress), accordingly vanishes from the woods. Signs of her flight and bear markings upon a trunk get discovered yet she remains completely absent. Rumours and anxieties regarding a human-devouring bear roaming the woodland spread, yet the clergyman has another theory which he and his ward set out to prove.
A Strange Creation
This Bear Drama is a somewhat peculiar show. It conjures a fine sense of the desolation that allows suspicion and prejudice and dark myths flourish based on local folklore that animals might be dominated or inhabited by the souls of humans. And it doesn’t idealising the hardscrabble life experienced by the villagers, where violence, whether that of the wild or people, lurks constantly on the edges, waiting to erupt. But the characters rarely become beyond symbols – or maybe, as the struggles between justice and revenge, logic and faith, good and wickedness intensify, emblematic figures within a moral tale – which stops the entire production truly becoming immersive.
Tonal Inconsistencies
Additionally, there are numerous tonally jarring instances in which the pastor’s ability in finding evidence and discern the maid’s destiny becomes almost risible. He positions himself looking at broken milk pots and clumps of hair in hay barns as a fusion of Hercule Poirot and Sherlock Holmes – with Jussi a rather hapless assistant figure (neither of whom had to taste a blend of blood spatter and the boss’s spit to agree that, yes, it was clearly dried blood on the site), prior to declaring his newest conclusion and pulling a corpse out of a swamp.
Opposing Goals
The village elite are determined demonstrating that the maid met her end by an animal, maybe to preserve the calm, perhaps to protect a fellow elite. The clergyman is intent on establishing otherwise, and the proof so rapidly accumulates supporting his view that again the show’s credibility and the viewer’s patience get strained. In its finest moments, To Cook a Bear evokes memories of the adaptation a few years ago of the author’s The Essex Serpent, through its portrayal of the competing allures and fears offered by rational thought and religion. In its low points, it’s more like Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Nevertheless, it does seem to offer the answer to that debated question: “Ladies, take the bear.”
The series streams on Disney+ currently.
