An heated discussion lately spread widely on social media, after someone posed a query for females: would you rather be lost in the woods alongside a male or with a bear? Similar to the best thought experiments, it exposed wildly different perspectives and life encounters, highlighted divides among genders, and could easily cause a deep personal dilemma for anyone pondering on it for too long. Additionally, there came the predictable follow-up where some males came online to inform women how foolish they had been to select the animal and proceeded to limn the consequences they deserved for it. This at minimum allowed those females who were uncertain over their choice to make it with renewed assurance.
Portraying the Scenario
To Cook a Bear skillfully brings to life this nifty small premise. The six-part series is based from Swedish author Mikael Niemi’s 2018 novel with the identical title (translated two years later for an English audience). It traces the tribulations of a clergyman (the lead actor) and his household as they come to start a new ministry in Kengis, a remote village in northern Sweden, during the mid-19th century. Within a community with few pleasures, not one of the locals particularly appreciate his puritanical approach to alcohol and revelry, but it is his defense of impoverished people – particularly the native Sami population, from among whom comes the preacher’s adopted son Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in social justice and equality that places him in direct opposition with the Kengis powers that be.
The Antagonists
Soon in cahoots against him are the lawman Brahe (the performer), the intimidating factory proprietor the matron Sjödahl (Pernilla August), seen early on dismissing a recently mangled worker with a month’s pay as he remains babbling upon seeing his crushed hand, and all others who profit from a populace who can be bought for a few bottles of liquor sold by the creepy shopkeeper Lindmark (the actor). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s creepiness diminishes once itinerant painter the artist Beronius arrives in the story (Simon J Berger, delivering a performance of rare discomfiting power). While they remain – like the pastor himself – only a little more being stereotypes, they still serve as potent archetypes.
Plot Progression
Once the foundations of conflict planted, it is time to get down with the storyline. The servant from the doctor’s house, the character Hilda (the actress), duly vanishes in the forest. Signs of her escape and animal scratches on a tree get discovered yet she remains nowhere to be seen. Gossip and fears of a man/maid-eating bear prowling the woods circulate, but the pastor holds a different view that he and Jussi set out to verify.
A Strange Creation
To Cook a Bear is a slightly peculiar show. It creates a fine sense of the desolation that allows suspicion and bias and grim legends flourish based on local folklore that bears can be controlled or inhabited by the souls of humans. It avoids idealising the tough existence experienced by the residents, in which brutality, be it from the wild or mankind, always looms at the periphery, poised to explode. Yet the personas rarely become more than ciphers – or maybe, while the conflicts amid fairness and revenge, logic and religion, virtue and wickedness intensify, emblematic figures in a fable – which stops the whole thing truly coming to life.
Stylistic Shifts
Additionally, exist numerous stylistically clashing instances where the clergyman’s skill in finding evidence and discern the maid’s destiny turns almost risible. He positions himself looking at broken milk pots and strands of fur in hay barns as a fusion of the Belgian detective the English sleuth – alongside Jussi a rather hapless Hastings-cum-Watson (none of whom had to lick a mixture of blood spatter and saliva from his superior to confirm that, yes, it was clearly coagulated blood at the crime scene), prior to declaring his latest deduction and pulling a corpse out of a swamp.
Opposing Goals
The local leaders are bent on proving that the maid was killed by a bear, perhaps to protect the calm, or possibly to shield a fellow elite. The clergyman is bent on proving the opposite, and the proof so quickly accumulates in his favour that once more the show’s credibility and audience tolerance get strained. At its best, the series is reminiscent of the TV version some years back of the author’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the opposing allures and terrors offered by rational thought and belief. In its low points, it resembles a bear-themed police procedural. Nevertheless, it does seem to provide the answer to that debated question: “Females, choose the animal.”
The series is on Disney+ currently.
