An intense discussion lately went viral across online platforms, following someone posed a query to women: which would you prefer be lost in a forest with a man or a bear? Similar to the best thought experiments, it exposed wildly different perspectives and experiences, highlighted divides among genders, and could easily 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 tell females how stupid they were for choosing the animal and went on to describe the consequences they deserved for that choice. This at least enabled the women who were uncertain over their choice to decide with renewed assurance.
Portraying the Scenario
To Cook a Bear effectively brings to life this clever small premise. This six-episode series is adapted on Swedish author Mikael Niemi’s 2018 book with the identical title (rendered two years later for an English audience). It follows the tribulations of a pastor (the lead actor) and his family as they come to begin a fresh religious post in Kengis, a remote village in northern Sweden, during the mid-19th century. In a place with few pleasures, none of the locals especially warm to his strict approach to drinking and revelry, but it is his protection of impoverished people – particularly the native Sami population, from which hails the pastor’s foster child the youth Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his conviction in social justice and equal rights that sets him in direct opposition against the Kengis local authorities.
The Opposing Forces
Soon collaborating opposing him are the lawman the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the fearsome factory proprietor the matron Sjödahl (the actress), observed initially firing a newly injured laborer with minimal compensation as he remains babbling upon seeing his crushed hand, and all others who profit from a community easily swayed for a few bottles of liquor sold by the creepy store owner the merchant Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). Although, to be fair, Lindmark’s creepiness pales once travelling artist the artist Beronius appears on the scene (Simon J Berger, providing an acting turn of exceptional unsettling intensity). If they are – like the pastor himself – only a little more being stereotypes, they are at least potent archetypes.
Narrative Development
Once the foundations of tension sown, it is time to proceed to narrative business. The servant employed by the doctor, Hilda (the actress), duly vanishes in the forest. Indications of her flight and animal scratches upon a trunk are found yet she remains nowhere to be seen. Rumours and anxieties of a man/maid-eating bear roaming the woodland circulate, but the pastor holds a different view which he and his ward set out to prove.
A Strange Creation
To Cook a Bear is a slightly peculiar show. It conjures a strong impression of the bleakness that allows distrust and bias and grim legends thrive based on local folklore that animals can be controlled or inhabited by the spirits of humans. It avoids idealising the tough existence experienced by the residents, where violence, whether that of the wild or people, lurks constantly on the edges, waiting to erupt. But the characters rarely become beyond symbols – or perhaps, as the struggles amid fairness and revenge, rationality and religion, good and evil intensify, emblematic figures in a fable – which stops the whole thing fully becoming immersive.
Tonal Inconsistencies
Additionally, exist numerous stylistically clashing moments in which the pastor’s ability to discover clues and discern Hilda’s fate turns almost risible. He stands looking at broken milk pots and strands of fur in hay barns as a fusion of Hercule Poirot and Sherlock Holmes – with Jussi a particularly unfortunate assistant figure (neither of whom had to taste a blend of blood spatter 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 pulling a body from a bog.
Opposing Goals
The village elite are bent on proving that the maid was killed by a bear, maybe to preserve the calm, perhaps to protect one of their own. The pastor is intent on establishing the opposite, and the evidence so rapidly stacks up supporting his view that once more the show’s credibility and audience tolerance are tested. At its best, the series evokes memories of the adaptation some years back of Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, through its portrayal of the competing allures and fears offered by science and belief. In its low points, it’s more like Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Nevertheless, it does seem to provide the response to the earlier query: “Ladies, take the bear.”
The series is on Disney+ currently.
