A heated debate lately went viral across online platforms, after a user 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 exposed vastly opposing perspectives and life encounters, highlighted chasms between the sexes, and could easily cause a deep personal dilemma if you thought on it for too long. There was also the almost inevitable follow-up where some males came online to tell females how stupid they had been for choosing the bear and went on to limn the punishments they merited for it. This at minimum enabled the women who had been hesitating over their choice to make it with a new confidence.
Portraying the Setup
To Cook a Bear effectively brings to life this nifty small premise. The six-part series is adapted on Swedish author Mikael Niemi’s 2018 book with the identical title (translated in 2020 for English readers). It follows the struggles of a clergyman (the lead actor) and his family when they arrive to start a new ministry in Kengis, a remote village in northern Sweden, during the mid-19th century. In a place lacking many joys, none of the locals especially warm to his puritanical stance on drinking and revelry, yet it is his defense of impoverished people – particularly the native Sami population, from among whom hails the preacher’s foster child the youth Jussi (the young actor) – and his conviction in social justice and equality that sets him in direct opposition with the Kengis powers that be.
The Antagonists
Soon in cahoots against him include the sheriff the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the fearsome factory proprietor the matron Sjödahl (Pernilla August), seen early on firing a newly injured laborer with minimal compensation as he remains gibbering 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 provided by the unsettling shopkeeper Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). Although, to be fair, Lindmark’s eeriness pales once itinerant painter Beronius arrives on the scene (Simon J Berger, delivering an acting turn of exceptional discomfiting power). While they remain – like the pastor himself – just slightly beyond than caricatures, they are at least effective ones.
Plot Progression
Once the foundations of conflict sown, it is time to proceed with the storyline. The servant employed by the doctor, the character Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), duly goes missing in the forest. Indications of her flight and animal scratches upon a trunk get discovered yet she remains nowhere to be seen. Rumours and anxieties of a man/maid-eating bear roaming the woods circulate, yet the clergyman has another theory which he and his ward embark to verify.
A Strange Creation
This Bear Drama is a somewhat peculiar show. It conjures a fine sense of the bleakness that allows suspicion and prejudice and grim legends flourish based on local folklore that bears might be dominated or possessed by the souls of men. It avoids romanticise the hardscrabble life led by the villagers, in which violence, whether that of nature or mankind, always looms on the edges, waiting to erupt. Yet the personas seldom evolve beyond symbols – or maybe, while the conflicts between justice and revenge, logic and religion, good and evil escalate, representative characters within a moral tale – which stops the whole thing fully coming to life.
Stylistic Shifts
Additionally, exist the many stylistically clashing moments in which the clergyman’s skill to discover clues and determine the maid’s destiny turns almost risible. He stands observing shattered containers and clumps of hair within storage sheds as a fusion of the Belgian detective and Sherlock Holmes – alongside Jussi a rather hapless Hastings-cum-Watson (neither of whom were required to taste a mixture of blood droplets and saliva from his superior to confirm that indeed, it was clearly dried blood on the site), before announcing his newest conclusion and extracting a body from a bog.
Clashing Agendas
The village elite are bent on demonstrating that Hilda was killed by an animal, maybe to preserve the calm, or possibly to protect one of their own. The pastor is intent on establishing the opposite, and the proof so quickly accumulates 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 a few years ago of the author’s the serpent tale, through its portrayal of the competing allures and fears presented by science and religion. In its low points, it resembles Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Still, it does seem to offer the response to that debated question: “Females, choose the animal.”
The series streams on Disney+ currently.
