A intense discussion lately went viral across online platforms, following a user asked a query for females: which would you prefer find yourself stranded in a forest alongside a male or a bear? Similar to the best thought experiments, it revealed wildly different perspectives and life encounters, illuminated divides among genders, and could easily cause an existential crisis if you thought on it for too long. Additionally, there came the almost inevitable follow-up where men of a certain stripe came online to inform females how foolish they were for choosing the bear and went on to describe the punishments they deserved for it. This at minimum allowed those females who were uncertain about their decision to decide with a new confidence.
Dramatising the Setup
To Cook a Bear effectively dramatises this clever small premise. This six-episode series is based from Scandinavian writer Mikael Niemi’s 2018 novel with the identical title (rendered two years later for an English audience). It follows the tribulations of a clergyman (the lead actor) and his household when they arrive to begin a new ministry within Kengis, an isolated village in northern Sweden, in 1852. Within a community lacking many joys, none of the locals especially warm to his strict stance on drinking and revelry, but it is his protection of the poor – particularly the indigenous Sami, from among whom hails the preacher’s foster child the youth Jussi (the young actor) – and his conviction in societal fairness and equality that sets him on a collision course against the Kengis powers that be.
The Antagonists
Soon collaborating against him are the lawman Brahe (the performer), the fearsome mill owner Madam Sjödahl (Pernilla August), seen early on firing a recently mangled laborer with minimal compensation while he is still babbling upon seeing of his pulped hand, and anyone else who benefit from a populace who can be bought with some containers of liquor provided by the unsettling shopkeeper the merchant Lindmark (the actor). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s creepiness diminishes when travelling artist Beronius appears on the scene (the performer, delivering a performance of exceptional unsettling intensity). If they are – like the pastor himself – 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 servant employed by the doctor, the character Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), duly vanishes in the forest. Indications of her escape and animal scratches upon a trunk are found yet she remains nowhere to be seen. Gossip and fears of a man/maid-eating bear prowling the woods spread, but the pastor has another theory which he and his ward set out to prove.
An Odd Beast
To Cook a Bear is a slightly odd beast. It creates a strong impression of the desolation that allows distrust and bias and grim legends thrive from the native legend that bears can be controlled or possessed by the souls of men. And it doesn’t romanticise the tough existence experienced by the villagers, where violence, be it from the wild or people, lurks constantly on the edges, poised to explode. Yet the personas rarely become beyond symbols – or perhaps, while the conflicts between justice and revenge, rationality and religion, good and evil escalate, emblematic figures in a fable – which stops the entire production truly becoming immersive.
Tonal Inconsistencies
And then, exist numerous stylistically clashing moments where the pastor’s ability to discover clues and discern the maid’s destiny turns nearly laughable. He stands looking at broken milk pots and clumps of hair in hay barns as a fusion of Hercule Poirot and Sherlock Holmes – alongside Jussi a rather hapless Hastings-cum-Watson (neither of whom were required to lick a blend of blood droplets 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 extracting a corpse from a bog.
Opposing Goals
The village elite are determined demonstrating that Hilda met her end by an animal, perhaps to protect the calm, perhaps to protect a fellow elite. The clergyman is bent on proving otherwise, and the evidence so quickly stacks up in his favour that once more the show’s credibility and audience tolerance are tested. In its finest moments, the series is reminiscent of the TV version some years back of Sarah Perry’s the serpent tale, with its evocation of the competing attractions and terrors presented by rational thought and belief. At its worst, it resembles a bear-themed police procedural. Still, it appears to offer the answer to the earlier query: “Females, choose the animal.”
The series streams on Disney+ now.
