A intense debate recently spread widely across online platforms, after a user posed a query to women: would you rather be lost in a forest alongside a male or with a bear? Like all the most engaging hypothetical scenarios, it revealed vastly opposing perspectives and experiences, highlighted chasms between the sexes, and was likely cause an existential crisis for anyone pondering about it for too long. There was also the predictable follow-up where men of a certain stripe came online to inform females how foolish they were for choosing the animal and went on to limn the consequences they deserved for that choice. This at minimum enabled the women who were uncertain over their choice to make it with a new confidence.
Portraying the Scenario
To Cook a Bear effectively brings to life this clever small premise. This six-episode drama is adapted from Swedish author Mikael Niemi’s 2018 novel with the identical title (rendered in 2020 for English readers). It traces the struggles of a clergyman (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his family as they come to start a fresh religious post within Kengis, an isolated village in northern Sweden, during the mid-19th century. Within a community lacking many joys, none of the inhabitants especially appreciate his puritanical approach to drinking and dancing, but it is his defense of impoverished people – especially the native Sami population, from among whom comes the preacher’s foster child the youth Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his conviction in social justice and equality that places him in direct opposition with the Kengis local authorities.
The Antagonists
Quickly in cahoots opposing him include the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the fearsome factory proprietor Madam Sjödahl (Pernilla August), observed initially dismissing a recently mangled worker with minimal compensation as he remains babbling at the sight of his pulped hand, and anyone else who profit from a populace easily swayed for a few bottles of liquor sold by the creepy store owner the merchant Lindmark (the actor). Although, in fairness, Lindmark’s eeriness diminishes 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 than caricatures, they are at least potent archetypes.
Narrative Development
Once the foundations of tension planted, the moment arrives to get down to narrative business. The maid from the doctor’s house, the character Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), duly goes missing from the woods. Signs of her escape and animal scratches upon a trunk get discovered but she is nowhere to be seen. Rumours and fears of a man/maid-eating beast roaming the woodland spread, yet the clergyman holds a different view which he and his ward set out to verify.
A Strange Creation
This Bear Drama is a slightly odd beast. It creates a fine sense of the desolation that lets distrust and bias and dark myths thrive from the native legend that bears can be controlled or possessed by the spirits of men. And it doesn’t romanticise the tough existence experienced by the residents, in which brutality, whether that of nature or people, lurks constantly at the periphery, waiting to erupt. But the characters seldom evolve beyond symbols – or maybe, as the struggles between justice and vengeance, logic and religion, virtue and wickedness escalate, representative characters within a moral tale – preventing the whole thing fully coming to life.
Tonal Inconsistencies
Additionally, exist the many tonally jarring moments in which the clergyman’s skill in finding evidence and determine Hilda’s fate becomes almost risible. He positions himself observing shattered containers and clumps of hair in hay barns like a combined the Belgian detective the English sleuth – alongside Jussi a rather hapless Hastings-cum-Watson (neither of whom had to lick a blend of blood spatter and the boss’s spit to agree that indeed, it was clearly dried blood at the crime scene), prior to declaring his latest deduction and pulling a body out of a swamp.
Clashing Agendas
The village elite are determined proving that the maid met her end by a bear, maybe to preserve the peace, perhaps to shield a fellow elite. The clergyman is bent on establishing the opposite, and the proof so rapidly accumulates supporting his view that once more the drama’s plausibility and audience tolerance are tested. At its best, To Cook a Bear evokes memories of the adaptation a few years ago of Sarah Perry’s the serpent tale, with its evocation of the opposing allures and fears offered by science and religion. At its worst, it’s more like a bear-themed police procedural. Still, it appears to provide the response to the earlier query: “Ladies, take the bear.”
To Cook a Bear streams on Disney+ now.
