A intense debate lately spread widely on social media, after a user asked a query for females: which would you prefer be lost in the woods alongside a male or with a bear? Like all the most engaging thought experiments, it exposed vastly opposing perspectives and life encounters, highlighted chasms between the sexes, and could easily to induce a deep personal dilemma if you thought about it for too long. Additionally, there came the almost inevitable coda where some males took to the internet to tell females how stupid they were to select the animal and proceeded to limn the punishments they merited for it. This at least allowed those females who had been hesitating about their decision to decide with renewed assurance.
Portraying the Setup
To Cook a Bear effectively brings to life this clever small premise. The six-part series is adapted on Scandinavian writer Mikael Niemi’s 2018 book with the identical title (rendered two years later for an English audience). It traces the struggles of a clergyman (the lead actor) and his household when they arrive to start a fresh religious post within Kengis, an isolated settlement in northern Sweden, during the mid-19th century. Within a community with few pleasures, not one of the inhabitants particularly warm to his puritanical approach to drinking and revelry, but it is his protection of impoverished people – particularly the indigenous Sami, from which comes the preacher’s adopted son the youth Jussi (the young actor) – and his conviction in social justice and equality that sets him on a collision course with the Kengis local authorities.
The Antagonists
Quickly in cahoots against him are the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the fearsome mill owner Madam Sjödahl (Pernilla August), observed initially firing a recently mangled worker with a month’s pay while he is still babbling upon seeing of his pulped hand, and anyone else who benefit from a community who can be bought for a few bottles of liquor sold by the unsettling shopkeeper Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). Although, to be fair, Lindmark’s creepiness pales once itinerant painter Beronius appears in the story (Simon J Berger, providing an acting turn of rare discomfiting power). If they are – like the pastor himself – just slightly beyond being stereotypes, they are at least effective ones.
Plot Progression
With the seeds of tension planted, the moment arrives to get down to narrative business. The servant employed by the doctor, the character Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), accordingly goes missing in the forest. Indications of her escape and animal scratches upon a trunk are found yet she remains completely absent. Rumours and anxieties regarding a human-devouring bear prowling the woodland circulate, but the pastor holds a different view that he and Jussi embark to prove.
A Strange Creation
To Cook a Bear is a slightly peculiar show. It conjures a strong impression of the desolation that lets distrust and bias and grim legends flourish from the native legend that bears can be controlled or possessed by the souls of humans. It avoids romanticise the tough existence led by the residents, in which violence, whether that of nature or mankind, lurks constantly at the periphery, waiting to erupt. Yet the personas seldom evolve beyond symbols – or maybe, while the conflicts amid fairness and revenge, logic and religion, virtue and evil escalate, representative characters within a moral tale – preventing the whole thing fully coming to life.
Stylistic Shifts
And then, exist numerous stylistically clashing moments where the pastor’s ability in finding evidence and determine Hilda’s fate becomes almost risible. He positions himself observing broken milk pots and strands of fur in hay barns like a combined the Belgian detective the English sleuth – alongside Jussi a particularly unfortunate Hastings-cum-Watson (neither of whom had to taste a blend of blood spatter and the boss’s spit to agree that, yes, it was clearly dried blood on the site), prior to declaring his newest conclusion and pulling a body out of a swamp.
Opposing Goals
The village elite are determined proving that the maid met her end by an animal, maybe to protect the peace, perhaps to protect a fellow elite. The clergyman is intent on proving the opposite, and the evidence so quickly stacks up in his favour that once more the show’s credibility and the viewer’s patience get strained. At its best, the series evokes memories of the adaptation some years back of the author’s the serpent tale, through its portrayal of the competing attractions and fears presented by rational thought and religion. At its worst, it’s more like Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Still, it appears to provide the response to the earlier query: “Ladies, take the bear.”
To Cook a Bear is on Disney+ now.
