To Cook a Bear Review: This Daft Historical Crime Drama Is Like A Bear-Focused Detective Series
An intense debate lately went viral on social media, following someone asked the question to women: which would you prefer find yourself stranded in a forest with a man or a bear? Like all the most engaging thought experiments, it exposed vastly opposing worldviews and experiences, highlighted divides among genders, and could easily cause an existential crisis if you thought about it for too long. There was also the almost inevitable follow-up in which some males came online to inform women how stupid they had been for choosing the bear and went on to limn the consequences they merited for it. This at minimum allowed those females who had been hesitating over their choice to make it with a new confidence.
Dramatising the Scenario
To Cook a Bear effectively brings to life this clever small premise. The six-part series is based from Scandinavian writer Mikael Niemi’s 2018 novel with the identical title (translated two years later for English readers). It traces the struggles of a clergyman (the lead actor) and his household as they come to begin a fresh religious post within Kengis, a remote village in northern Sweden, in 1852. Within a community lacking many joys, not one of the inhabitants particularly appreciate his puritanical approach to drinking and revelry, but it is his protection of the poor – especially the native Sami population, from which hails the pastor’s adopted son Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in social justice and equality that sets him on a collision course against the Kengis powers that be.
The Antagonists
Soon collaborating against him include the lawman the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the intimidating mill owner 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 all others who profit from a community who can be bought for a few bottles of liquor sold by the unsettling shopkeeper Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s creepiness diminishes once itinerant painter the artist Beronius arrives on the scene (Simon J Berger, providing an acting turn of rare discomfiting power). If they are – like the pastor himself – only a little more than caricatures, they still serve as potent archetypes.
Plot Progression
Once the foundations of tension planted, the moment arrives to get down with the storyline. The maid employed by the doctor, Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), duly vanishes in the forest. Indications of her flight and animal scratches on a tree get discovered yet she remains nowhere to be seen. Gossip and fears of a man/maid-eating beast roaming the woodland circulate, yet the clergyman holds a different view which he and his ward set out to verify.
An Odd Beast
To Cook a Bear is a somewhat peculiar show. It creates a fine sense of the desolation that allows suspicion and bias and grim legends thrive from the native legend that bears can be controlled or inhabited by the souls of men. And it doesn’t romanticise the hardscrabble life led by the villagers, where brutality, whether that of the wild or mankind, lurks constantly at the periphery, poised to explode. But the characters seldom evolve beyond symbols – or perhaps, as the struggles between justice and vengeance, logic and faith, good and evil escalate, emblematic figures in a fable – preventing the entire production fully becoming immersive.
Tonal Inconsistencies
And then, there are the many stylistically clashing instances where the pastor’s ability to discover clues and determine the maid’s destiny turns nearly laughable. He stands observing broken milk pots and clumps of hair within storage sheds like a combined Hercule Poirot and Sherlock Holmes – with Jussi a particularly unfortunate Hastings-cum-Watson (neither of whom were required to lick a mixture of blood droplets and saliva from his superior to confirm that indeed, it was definitely 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 bent on demonstrating that Hilda was killed by a bear, perhaps to protect the peace, or possibly to protect one of their own. The clergyman is intent on proving the opposite, and the evidence so rapidly accumulates in his favour that once more the show’s credibility and the viewer’s patience are tested. At its best, the series evokes memories of the TV version a few years ago of the author’s the serpent tale, through its portrayal of the opposing allures and fears offered by science and belief. At its worst, it resembles a bear-themed police procedural. Nevertheless, it does seem to offer the answer to that debated question: “Ladies, take the bear.”
The series is on Disney+ now.
