An heated debate recently went viral on social media, after someone posed a query for females: which would you prefer find yourself stranded in a forest with a man or with a bear? Like all the most engaging thought experiments, it exposed wildly different perspectives and experiences, highlighted chasms among genders, and could easily cause an existential crisis for anyone pondering about it extensively. Additionally, there came the almost inevitable coda in which men of a certain stripe came online to inform females how stupid they were to select the animal and proceeded to describe the consequences they merited for it. This at least allowed those females who were uncertain about their decision to decide with renewed assurance.
Dramatising the Scenario
To Cook a Bear skillfully dramatises this nifty small premise. This six-episode series is based on Scandinavian writer Mikael Niemi’s 2018 novel with the identical title (rendered in 2020 for an English audience). It follows the tribulations of a pastor (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his family when they arrive to start a fresh religious post within Kengis, an isolated village in northern Sweden, during the mid-19th century. Within a community with few pleasures, not one of the inhabitants particularly appreciate his strict stance on drinking and revelry, yet it is his protection of the poor – especially the native Sami population, from among whom hails the preacher’s foster child Jussi (the young actor) – and his conviction in social justice and equal rights that places him on a collision course with the Kengis local authorities.
The Opposing Forces
Soon collaborating against him are the lawman the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the intimidating mill owner the matron Sjödahl (the actress), observed early on firing a newly injured worker with minimal compensation while he is still babbling at the sight his crushed hand, and anyone else who profit from a populace easily swayed with some containers of liquor sold by the unsettling store owner Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s eeriness pales once travelling artist the artist Beronius appears in the story (Simon J Berger, providing a performance of exceptional discomfiting power). While they remain – like the pastor himself – only a little more than caricatures, they are at least effective ones.
Narrative Development
With the seeds of tension sown, it is time to proceed with the storyline. The maid employed by the doctor, Hilda (the actress), duly vanishes in the forest. Indications of her flight and bear markings upon a trunk are found but she is nowhere to be seen. Rumours and anxieties regarding a human-devouring beast prowling the woods circulate, but the pastor has another theory which he and his ward embark to verify.
An Odd Beast
This Bear Drama is a somewhat odd beast. It creates a fine sense of the bleakness that allows distrust and bias and dark myths flourish from the native legend that animals can be controlled or possessed by the spirits of humans. It avoids romanticise the tough existence led by the residents, in which brutality, be it from nature or people, lurks constantly at the periphery, waiting to erupt. But the characters rarely become more than ciphers – or maybe, as the struggles between justice and vengeance, logic and religion, good and evil escalate, representative characters within a moral tale – which stops the whole thing fully becoming immersive.
Tonal Inconsistencies
And then, exist the many stylistically clashing instances where the pastor’s ability to discover clues and discern Hilda’s fate turns nearly laughable. He positions himself 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 assistant figure (none of whom were required to lick a mixture of blood spatter and the boss’s spit to agree that, yes, it was clearly coagulated blood at the crime scene), prior to declaring his newest conclusion and extracting a body out of a swamp.
Clashing Agendas
The local leaders are determined proving that Hilda met her end by an animal, maybe to protect the calm, or possibly to protect one of their own. The clergyman is intent on establishing the opposite, and the proof so rapidly stacks up supporting his view that once more the show’s credibility and the viewer’s patience get strained. In its finest moments, To Cook a Bear evokes memories of the adaptation some years back of the author’s The Essex Serpent, through its portrayal of the competing allures and terrors offered by science and belief. In its low points, it’s more like a bear-themed police procedural. Nevertheless, it does seem to provide the response to the earlier query: “Females, choose the animal.”
The series is on Disney+ currently.
