A heated discussion recently spread widely on social media, following someone posed the question for females: would you rather find yourself stranded in a forest with a man or with a bear? Like all the most engaging thought experiments, it exposed vastly opposing perspectives and life encounters, illuminated divides between the sexes, and was likely to induce a deep personal dilemma if you thought about it extensively. Additionally, there came the almost inevitable coda in which men of a certain stripe took to the internet to inform women how stupid they had been to select the animal and proceeded to describe the punishments they merited for it. This at least allowed the women who had been hesitating over their choice to decide with renewed assurance.
Dramatising the Scenario
To Cook a Bear skillfully brings to life this nifty small premise. The six-part drama is adapted from Scandinavian writer Mikael Niemi’s 2018 book with the identical title (translated two years later for English readers). It follows the struggles of a clergyman (the lead actor) and his household when they arrive to start a new ministry in Kengis, a remote village in Sweden’s north, during the mid-19th century. Within a community lacking many joys, not one of the locals particularly warm to his puritanical approach to drinking and revelry, but it is his defense of impoverished people – particularly the indigenous Sami, from among whom comes the preacher’s adopted son Jussi (the young actor) – and his belief in social justice and equality that places him on a collision course with the Kengis local authorities.
The Antagonists
Quickly in cahoots against him include the sheriff the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the fearsome mill owner the matron Sjödahl (the actress), observed initially dismissing a newly injured laborer with a month’s pay while he is still babbling at the sight his crushed hand, and all others who benefit from a community who can be bought for a few bottles of liquor sold by the unsettling store owner Lindmark (the actor). Although, in fairness, Lindmark’s eeriness diminishes once itinerant painter Beronius arrives on the scene (the performer, delivering an acting turn of rare discomfiting power). If they are – similar to the clergyman – just slightly beyond being stereotypes, they still serve as effective ones.
Plot Progression
Once the foundations of tension sown, the moment arrives to proceed to narrative business. The maid from the doctor’s house, the character Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), accordingly vanishes in the forest. Indications of her flight and animal scratches upon a trunk are found yet she remains completely absent. Rumours and anxieties regarding a human-devouring bear roaming the woods spread, yet the clergyman holds a different view that he and Jussi set out to prove.
A Strange Creation
To Cook a Bear is a somewhat peculiar show. It creates a fine sense of the bleakness that lets distrust and prejudice and grim legends thrive based on local folklore that animals can be controlled or inhabited by the spirits of humans. And it doesn’t idealising the tough existence experienced by the villagers, where brutality, whether that of the wild or mankind, always looms at the periphery, waiting to erupt. Yet the personas rarely become more than ciphers – or maybe, while the conflicts amid fairness and vengeance, logic and religion, virtue and evil escalate, emblematic figures in a fable – which stops the entire production fully coming to life.
Stylistic Shifts
Additionally, there are the many stylistically clashing moments in which the clergyman’s skill in finding evidence and determine the maid’s destiny becomes almost risible. He positions himself looking at shattered containers and clumps of hair in hay barns as a fusion of the Belgian detective the English sleuth – with Jussi a rather hapless assistant figure (none of whom had to taste a mixture of blood droplets and the boss’s spit to confirm that, yes, it was definitely dried blood at the crime scene), prior to declaring his newest conclusion and extracting a body from a bog.
Clashing Agendas
The village elite are bent on proving that the maid met her end by a bear, maybe to preserve the calm, or possibly to protect a fellow elite. The clergyman is intent on proving the opposite, and the evidence so rapidly accumulates supporting his view that once more the show’s credibility and the viewer’s patience are tested. In its finest moments, To Cook a Bear is reminiscent of the adaptation a few years ago of Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, through its portrayal of the competing allures and fears presented by science and belief. At its worst, it’s more like Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Still, it does seem to provide the response to the earlier query: “Ladies, take the bear.”
The series is on Disney+ now.
