A intense debate recently spread widely on social media, following a user posed the question for females: would you rather find yourself stranded in the woods with a man or with a bear? Like all the most engaging thought experiments, it exposed wildly different worldviews and life encounters, illuminated divides between the sexes, and could easily to induce a deep personal dilemma if you thought on it extensively. There was also the almost inevitable coda where men of a certain stripe took to the internet to tell females how foolish they had been for choosing the bear and went on to describe the consequences they merited for that choice. This at minimum enabled the women who were uncertain about their decision to decide with renewed assurance.
Dramatising the Setup
To Cook a Bear effectively dramatises this nifty small premise. This six-episode drama is adapted from Scandinavian writer Mikael Niemi’s 2018 novel with the identical title (rendered two years later for an English audience). It follows the struggles of a pastor (the lead actor) and his household when they arrive to begin a new ministry within Kengis, a remote settlement in northern Sweden, during the mid-19th century. Within a community lacking many joys, none of the locals especially appreciate his puritanical stance on drinking and revelry, but it is his protection of the poor – especially the indigenous Sami, from which hails the preacher’s foster child Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in societal fairness and equality that places him in direct opposition with the Kengis powers that be.
The Antagonists
Soon in cahoots against him are the sheriff the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the intimidating mill owner Madam Sjödahl (Pernilla August), seen initially firing a recently mangled laborer with minimal compensation as he remains gibbering upon seeing of his pulped hand, and all others who profit from a community easily swayed with some containers of liquor sold by the unsettling store owner Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). However, in fairness, Lindmark’s eeriness diminishes when itinerant painter the artist Beronius arrives in the story (Simon J Berger, providing an acting turn of rare discomfiting power). If they are – like the pastor himself – only a little more being stereotypes, they still serve as effective ones.
Plot Progression
With the seeds of conflict sown, the moment arrives to proceed to narrative business. The maid from the doctor’s house, the character Hilda (the actress), accordingly goes missing in the forest. Signs of her escape and animal scratches upon a trunk get discovered but she is completely absent. Gossip and anxieties regarding a human-devouring bear roaming the woodland circulate, but the pastor has another theory which he and his ward set out to verify.
An Odd Beast
To Cook a Bear is a slightly odd beast. It creates a strong impression of the desolation that allows distrust and bias and dark myths thrive from the native legend that animals might be dominated or inhabited by the spirits of humans. And it doesn’t idealising the hardscrabble life experienced by the residents, in which violence, be it from nature or mankind, lurks constantly on the edges, waiting to erupt. But the characters seldom evolve more than ciphers – or perhaps, while the conflicts amid fairness and vengeance, logic and faith, good and wickedness escalate, representative characters within a moral tale – preventing the entire production truly coming to life.
Stylistic Shifts
And then, exist the many stylistically clashing moments in which the pastor’s ability to discover clues and discern Hilda’s fate becomes nearly laughable. He stands observing broken milk pots and clumps of hair in hay barns like a combined Hercule Poirot and Sherlock Holmes – with Jussi a particularly unfortunate Hastings-cum-Watson (none of whom were required to taste a mixture of blood droplets and the boss’s spit to confirm that, yes, it was definitely coagulated blood at the crime scene), before announcing his newest conclusion and extracting a body from a bog.
Clashing Agendas
The village elite are bent on proving that the maid was killed by an animal, perhaps to protect the calm, perhaps to protect a fellow elite. The pastor is intent on proving the opposite, and the evidence so quickly accumulates supporting his view that once more the show’s credibility and audience tolerance get strained. In its finest moments, the series is reminiscent of the TV version some years back of Sarah Perry’s the serpent tale, with its evocation of the competing allures and terrors offered by rational thought and religion. At its worst, it’s more like a bear-themed police procedural. Still, it does seem to offer the response to that debated question: “Females, choose the animal.”
The series is on Disney+ now.