An intense debate lately spread widely across online platforms, after a user asked a query to women: would you rather be lost in the woods alongside a male or with a bear? Like all the most engaging hypothetical scenarios, it exposed wildly different worldviews and experiences, illuminated chasms among genders, and could easily to induce a deep personal dilemma if you thought on it extensively. There was also the predictable follow-up where some males took to the internet to tell females how stupid they were for choosing the animal and proceeded to limn the consequences they deserved for it. This at minimum allowed the women who had been hesitating about their decision to make it with renewed assurance.
Dramatising the Scenario
To Cook a Bear effectively brings to life this nifty little setup. This six-episode drama is based on Swedish author Mikael Niemi’s 2018 novel with the identical title (rendered in 2020 for an English audience). It follows the struggles of a clergyman (the lead actor) and his household when they arrive to start a new ministry within Kengis, an isolated village in Sweden’s north, in 1852. Within a community lacking many joys, not one of the locals especially appreciate his strict approach to alcohol and dancing, yet it is his defense of the poor – particularly the native Sami population, from among whom hails the pastor’s adopted son Jussi (the young actor) – and his belief in societal fairness and equality that places him in direct opposition against the Kengis powers that be.
The Opposing Forces
Quickly collaborating opposing him are the lawman Brahe (the performer), the intimidating factory proprietor the matron Sjödahl (Pernilla August), observed early on firing a recently mangled laborer with a month’s pay as he remains gibbering at the sight of his pulped hand, and all others who profit from a populace easily swayed with some containers of liquor provided by the unsettling shopkeeper Lindmark (the actor). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s creepiness diminishes when itinerant painter Beronius arrives on the scene (the performer, providing a performance of rare discomfiting power). While they remain – like the pastor himself – just slightly beyond being stereotypes, they are at least potent archetypes.
Plot Progression
Once the foundations of conflict planted, the moment arrives to proceed with the storyline. The servant employed by the doctor, the character Hilda (the actress), accordingly goes missing in the forest. Indications of her escape and animal scratches upon a trunk are found yet she remains completely absent. Gossip and anxieties of a man/maid-eating beast roaming the woods spread, but the pastor has another theory which he and his ward embark to verify.
A Strange Creation
This Bear Drama is a somewhat odd beast. It creates a strong impression of the bleakness that lets suspicion and prejudice and grim legends thrive based on local folklore that bears might be dominated or possessed by the souls of men. And it doesn’t romanticise the hardscrabble life experienced by the villagers, where violence, whether that of the wild or people, always looms on the edges, poised to explode. But the characters seldom evolve more than ciphers – or perhaps, while the conflicts between justice and revenge, rationality and religion, good and evil escalate, representative characters within a moral tale – preventing the whole thing fully becoming immersive.
Tonal Inconsistencies
Additionally, there are the many stylistically clashing moments in which the clergyman’s skill to discover clues and determine Hilda’s fate becomes nearly laughable. He positions himself looking at broken milk pots and clumps of hair in hay barns like a combined the Belgian detective the English sleuth – with Jussi a rather hapless assistant figure (neither of whom had to taste a mixture of blood spatter and the boss’s spit to confirm that, yes, it was clearly dried blood at the crime scene), prior to declaring his newest conclusion and extracting a corpse out of a swamp.
Opposing Goals
The village elite are determined proving that Hilda was killed by an animal, perhaps to preserve the calm, or possibly to shield one of their own. The clergyman is bent on proving the opposite, and the proof so quickly stacks up supporting his view that again the drama’s plausibility and audience tolerance are tested. At its best, To Cook a Bear evokes memories of the TV version some years back of the author’s the serpent tale, through its portrayal of the opposing attractions and terrors presented by science and belief. In its low points, it’s more like Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Still, it does seem to offer the response to the earlier query: “Females, choose the animal.”
To Cook a Bear streams on Disney+ currently.
