A heated discussion lately spread widely on social media, after someone posed a query to women: which would you prefer find yourself stranded in the woods alongside a male or a bear? Like all the most engaging hypothetical scenarios, it revealed wildly different worldviews and life encounters, highlighted divides among genders, and was likely cause an existential crisis if you thought about it extensively. Additionally, there came the predictable follow-up in which some males came online to tell females how foolish they were to select the animal and went on to limn the consequences they merited for that choice. This at least enabled the women who had been hesitating about their decision to decide with a new confidence.
Portraying the Scenario
To Cook a Bear skillfully dramatises this clever little setup. This six-episode series is adapted on Scandinavian writer Mikael Niemi’s 2018 book of the same name (translated in 2020 for English readers). It follows the tribulations of a pastor (the lead actor) and his household when they arrive to start a fresh religious post in Kengis, a remote village in Sweden’s north, during the mid-19th century. Within a community lacking many joys, not one of the inhabitants particularly appreciate his puritanical stance on alcohol and revelry, but it is his defense of the poor – particularly the native Sami population, from which hails the pastor’s adopted son the youth Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his conviction in societal fairness and equality that places him in direct opposition with the Kengis powers that be.
The Opposing Forces
Soon in cahoots against him include the sheriff the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the intimidating factory proprietor the matron Sjödahl (the actress), observed initially dismissing a recently mangled worker with a month’s pay while he is still gibbering at the sight his crushed hand, and anyone else who profit from a community who can be bought with some containers of the whisky sold by the unsettling shopkeeper Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s eeriness diminishes once travelling artist the artist Beronius appears on the scene (Simon J Berger, providing a performance of exceptional discomfiting power). If they are – similar to the clergyman – only a little more than caricatures, they still serve as potent archetypes.
Plot Progression
With the seeds of conflict planted, it is time to get down with the storyline. The maid employed by the doctor, Hilda (the actress), duly vanishes from the woods. Indications of her escape and bear markings on a tree are found but she is nowhere to be seen. Rumours and anxieties regarding a human-devouring beast prowling the woodland circulate, but the pastor holds a different view which he and his ward embark to prove.
A Strange Creation
To Cook a Bear is a slightly odd beast. It conjures a fine sense of the bleakness that lets suspicion and bias and dark myths flourish from the native legend that bears can be controlled or possessed by the souls of men. It avoids romanticise the hardscrabble life led by the residents, where brutality, be it from nature or people, lurks constantly at the periphery, waiting to erupt. But the characters seldom evolve beyond symbols – or perhaps, as the struggles amid fairness and vengeance, logic and faith, good and evil intensify, emblematic figures in a fable – which stops the whole thing truly becoming immersive.
Stylistic Shifts
And then, there are numerous stylistically clashing moments in which the clergyman’s skill to discover clues and discern the maid’s destiny becomes almost risible. He positions himself looking at broken milk pots and strands of fur in hay barns as a fusion of Hercule Poirot the English sleuth – with Jussi a rather hapless Hastings-cum-Watson (none of whom had to lick a mixture of blood droplets and the boss’s spit to agree that, yes, it was definitely dried blood on the site), before announcing his latest deduction and pulling a body from a bog.
Clashing Agendas
The village elite are bent on proving that the maid was killed by a bear, perhaps to preserve the calm, or possibly to protect a fellow elite. The pastor is bent on establishing the opposite, and the evidence so quickly stacks up in his favour that once more the show’s credibility and the viewer’s patience are tested. At its best, To Cook a Bear evokes memories of the TV version a few years ago of Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the opposing attractions and fears offered by science and belief. In its low points, it’s more like Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Nevertheless, it appears to provide the answer to the earlier query: “Females, choose the animal.”
To Cook a Bear is on Disney+ now.
