A heated debate lately spread widely across online platforms, following a user asked a query for females: would you rather find yourself stranded in the woods alongside a male or with a bear? Like all the most engaging hypothetical scenarios, it revealed vastly opposing worldviews and life encounters, illuminated chasms between the sexes, and could easily to induce a deep personal dilemma for anyone pondering on it for too long. There was also the predictable coda where men of a certain stripe took to the internet to tell females how foolish they were for choosing the animal and went on to describe the consequences they deserved for it. This at least enabled those females who had been hesitating over their choice to make it with renewed assurance.
Portraying the Scenario
To Cook a Bear skillfully brings to life this clever little setup. This six-episode series is adapted on Scandinavian writer Mikael Niemi’s 2018 novel of the same name (rendered two years later for English readers). It traces the struggles of a pastor (the lead actor) and his family as they come to start a fresh religious post within Kengis, a remote settlement in northern Sweden, in 1852. In a place with few pleasures, none of the inhabitants especially warm to his strict stance on alcohol and revelry, but it is his protection of the poor – particularly the indigenous Sami, from which comes the preacher’s adopted son the youth Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in social justice and equality that places him in direct opposition with the Kengis powers that be.
The Opposing Forces
Soon in cahoots opposing him include the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the intimidating factory proprietor the matron Sjödahl (Pernilla August), observed early on firing a newly injured worker with a month’s pay while he is still gibbering at the sight his crushed hand, and all others who profit from a populace easily swayed with some containers of the whisky provided by the creepy shopkeeper the merchant Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s eeriness diminishes once travelling artist Beronius arrives on the scene (Simon J Berger, delivering a performance of rare unsettling intensity). If they are – like the pastor himself – just slightly beyond being stereotypes, they are at least potent archetypes.
Plot Progression
Once the foundations of conflict planted, it is time to get down with the storyline. The servant employed by the doctor, Hilda (the actress), duly goes missing from the woods. Signs of her escape and bear markings upon a trunk get discovered but she is nowhere to be seen. Rumours and anxieties regarding a human-devouring beast roaming the woodland circulate, but the pastor has another theory that he and Jussi set out to prove.
A Strange Creation
This Bear Drama is a somewhat odd beast. It conjures a fine sense of the bleakness that lets suspicion and bias and dark myths thrive based on local folklore that bears might be dominated or inhabited by the souls of men. It avoids idealising the hardscrabble life experienced by the villagers, where violence, whether that of nature or people, always looms at the periphery, waiting to erupt. But the characters rarely become more than ciphers – or perhaps, as the struggles between justice and vengeance, logic and religion, good and evil escalate, emblematic figures within a moral tale – preventing the whole thing truly coming to life.
Tonal Inconsistencies
Additionally, exist numerous tonally jarring instances in which the clergyman’s skill in finding evidence and discern the maid’s destiny becomes nearly laughable. He stands observing broken milk pots and strands of fur within storage sheds as a fusion of Hercule Poirot the English sleuth – alongside Jussi a rather hapless assistant figure (neither of whom had to taste a blend of blood spatter and the boss’s spit to agree that indeed, it was clearly coagulated blood on the site), prior to declaring his latest deduction and pulling a body from a bog.
Opposing Goals
The local leaders are bent on demonstrating that the maid met her end by a bear, maybe to preserve the peace, perhaps to shield a fellow elite. The pastor is intent on proving otherwise, and the proof so rapidly stacks up supporting his view that again the show’s credibility and audience tolerance get strained. At its best, the series evokes memories of the adaptation a few years ago of the author’s the serpent tale, through its portrayal of the competing allures and fears offered by rational thought and religion. At its worst, it’s more like Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Nevertheless, it does seem to provide the response to the earlier query: “Females, choose the animal.”
To Cook a Bear is on Disney+ now.
