An intense discussion recently went viral across online platforms, following someone posed a query for females: which would you prefer find yourself stranded in the woods alongside a male or a bear? Like all the most engaging hypothetical scenarios, it revealed wildly different perspectives and experiences, highlighted chasms among genders, and could easily cause a deep personal dilemma for anyone pondering on it extensively. Additionally, there came the almost inevitable coda in which some males took to the internet to tell females how stupid they were to select the animal and proceeded to limn the consequences they deserved for it. This at minimum enabled those females who had been hesitating over their choice to make it with a new confidence.
Portraying the Setup
To Cook a Bear skillfully dramatises this nifty small premise. This six-episode drama is based from Scandinavian writer Mikael Niemi’s 2018 book with the identical title (translated in 2020 for an English audience). It follows the tribulations of a pastor (the lead actor) and his family when they arrive to start a fresh religious post in Kengis, a remote settlement in northern Sweden, during the mid-19th century. Within a community with few pleasures, none of the inhabitants particularly warm to his strict stance on drinking and dancing, but it is his defense of the poor – particularly the indigenous Sami, from which hails the preacher’s foster child Jussi (the young actor) – and his conviction in social justice and equality that sets him on a collision course against the Kengis local authorities.
The Opposing Forces
Soon collaborating opposing him are the sheriff the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the intimidating factory proprietor the matron Sjödahl (Pernilla August), seen early on firing a recently mangled worker with minimal compensation while he is still babbling at the sight his crushed hand, and anyone else who profit from a community who can be bought with some containers of liquor provided by the creepy shopkeeper Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). However, in fairness, Lindmark’s eeriness diminishes when travelling artist the artist Beronius appears in the story (the performer, providing a performance of exceptional unsettling intensity). While they remain – like the pastor himself – just slightly beyond being stereotypes, they are at least potent archetypes.
Narrative Development
Once the foundations of conflict planted, it is time to proceed to narrative business. The servant employed by the doctor, the character Hilda (the actress), accordingly vanishes from the woods. Indications of her escape and bear markings upon a trunk get discovered yet she remains completely absent. Rumours and fears regarding a human-devouring beast roaming the woods circulate, but the pastor holds a different view that he and Jussi embark to verify.
A Strange Creation
To Cook a Bear is a somewhat odd beast. 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 possessed by the spirits of men. It avoids idealising the hardscrabble life experienced by the villagers, in which brutality, whether that of the wild or mankind, always looms on the edges, poised to explode. But the characters rarely become more than ciphers – or perhaps, as the struggles amid fairness and vengeance, rationality and religion, good and wickedness intensify, representative characters in a fable – which stops the whole thing fully becoming immersive.
Tonal Inconsistencies
Additionally, exist the many tonally jarring instances in which the pastor’s ability in finding evidence and discern the maid’s destiny turns nearly laughable. He positions himself observing broken milk pots and clumps of hair in hay barns like a combined Hercule Poirot the English sleuth – with Jussi a rather hapless Hastings-cum-Watson (neither of whom had to lick a blend of blood droplets and saliva from his superior to agree that, yes, it was clearly dried blood on the site), prior to declaring his latest deduction and extracting a corpse out of a swamp.
Clashing Agendas
The local leaders are determined proving that Hilda was killed by a bear, perhaps to protect the calm, or possibly to shield a fellow elite. The clergyman is bent on establishing otherwise, and the evidence so rapidly stacks up in his favour that again the drama’s plausibility and audience tolerance get strained. At its best, To Cook a Bear evokes memories of the adaptation some years back of the author’s the serpent tale, through its portrayal of the opposing allures and terrors offered by science and religion. In its low points, it resembles a bear-themed police procedural. Nevertheless, it does seem to offer the response to the earlier query: “Females, choose the animal.”
The series streams on Disney+ currently.
