A intense discussion recently went viral across online platforms, following someone asked a query to women: which would you prefer find yourself stranded in the woods with a man or a bear? Like all the most engaging hypothetical scenarios, it exposed vastly opposing perspectives and life encounters, highlighted chasms between the sexes, and could easily cause an existential crisis for anyone pondering on it for too long. There was also the almost inevitable coda where men of a certain stripe took to the internet to tell females how stupid they had been to select the bear and went on to limn the punishments they deserved for it. This at minimum allowed the women who had been hesitating over their choice to make it with a new confidence.
Dramatising the Scenario
To Cook a Bear skillfully dramatises this nifty small premise. The six-part series is based from Scandinavian writer Mikael Niemi’s 2018 novel with the identical title (rendered two years later for English readers). It traces the struggles of a pastor (the lead actor) and his household when they arrive to begin a new ministry within Kengis, a remote village in northern Sweden, in 1852. Within a community with few pleasures, not one of the inhabitants particularly warm to his strict approach to drinking and dancing, yet it is his defense of the poor – especially the indigenous Sami, from which hails the preacher’s foster child Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his conviction in social justice and equality that sets him in direct opposition with the Kengis local authorities.
The Antagonists
Quickly in cahoots opposing him are the lawman Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the fearsome mill owner Madam Sjödahl (Pernilla August), observed early on firing a recently mangled worker with a month’s pay while he is still gibbering at the sight of his pulped hand, and all others who profit from a community who can be bought with some containers of the whisky provided by the unsettling shopkeeper Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). However, in fairness, Lindmark’s creepiness pales once itinerant painter the artist Beronius arrives on the scene (Simon J Berger, delivering a performance of exceptional discomfiting power). While they remain – similar to the clergyman – only a little more than caricatures, they still serve as potent archetypes.
Narrative Development
Once the foundations of tension planted, it is time to get down to narrative business. The servant employed by the doctor, Hilda (the actress), duly vanishes in the forest. Signs of her flight and bear markings upon a trunk are found yet she remains nowhere to be seen. Gossip and fears of a man/maid-eating beast prowling the woodland circulate, yet the clergyman holds a different view which he and his ward set out to verify.
A Strange Creation
To Cook a Bear is a slightly odd beast. It creates a fine sense of the desolation that allows distrust and prejudice and grim legends flourish from the native legend that bears can be controlled or inhabited by the souls of men. It avoids idealising the tough existence experienced by the villagers, where brutality, whether that of nature or people, lurks constantly at the periphery, waiting to erupt. Yet the personas seldom evolve more than ciphers – or maybe, as the struggles between justice and revenge, rationality and faith, good and evil escalate, representative characters in a fable – preventing the entire production fully coming to life.
Tonal Inconsistencies
And then, exist the many 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 within storage sheds as a fusion of Hercule Poirot and Sherlock Holmes – alongside Jussi a rather hapless assistant figure (none of whom had to taste a blend of blood spatter and the boss’s spit to agree that indeed, it was clearly coagulated blood at the crime scene), prior to declaring his newest conclusion and pulling a corpse from a bog.
Opposing Goals
The local leaders are determined demonstrating that the maid was killed by a bear, maybe to protect the calm, perhaps to protect a fellow elite. The pastor is bent on establishing the opposite, and the evidence so rapidly stacks up supporting his view that again the drama’s plausibility and the viewer’s patience are tested. In its finest moments, To Cook a Bear evokes memories of the adaptation some years back of the author’s the serpent tale, through its portrayal of the competing attractions and fears offered by rational thought and belief. At its worst, it’s more like a bear-themed police procedural. Still, it appears to offer the response to that debated question: “Ladies, take the bear.”
To Cook a Bear is on Disney+ currently.
