A heated debate recently spread widely across online platforms, following someone posed a query to women: which would you prefer be lost in the woods alongside a male or with a bear? Similar to the most engaging thought experiments, it exposed wildly different perspectives and experiences, illuminated chasms between the sexes, and could easily to induce a deep personal dilemma if you thought on it for too long. Additionally, there came the almost inevitable coda where men of a certain stripe took to the internet to tell women how foolish they had been for choosing the bear and went on to limn the consequences they deserved 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 dramatises this nifty small premise. This six-episode drama is adapted from Scandinavian writer Mikael Niemi’s 2018 novel of the same name (translated in 2020 for an English audience). It follows the tribulations of a pastor (the lead actor) and his household when they arrive to begin a new ministry within Kengis, an isolated village in Sweden’s north, in 1852. Within a community lacking many joys, not one of the locals especially appreciate his puritanical approach to drinking and dancing, but it is his protection of the poor – especially the indigenous Sami, from which comes the preacher’s adopted son the youth Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his conviction in societal fairness and equality that sets him in direct opposition with the Kengis powers that be.
The Antagonists
Soon collaborating opposing him are the sheriff the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the intimidating factory proprietor Madam Sjödahl (Pernilla August), seen initially dismissing a newly injured laborer with a month’s pay as he remains gibbering at the sight his crushed hand, and anyone else who benefit from a community who can be bought with some containers of the whisky provided by the creepy store owner Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). Although, to be fair, Lindmark’s eeriness pales once itinerant painter the artist Beronius appears in the story (the performer, providing an acting turn of exceptional unsettling intensity). While they remain – like the pastor himself – just slightly beyond being stereotypes, they are at least effective ones.
Narrative Development
Once the foundations of tension sown, it is time to proceed to narrative business. The maid employed by the doctor, Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), accordingly vanishes from the woods. Signs of her escape and animal scratches on a tree are found yet she remains nowhere to be seen. Rumours and anxieties regarding a human-devouring beast prowling the woodland circulate, yet the clergyman has another theory which he and his ward set out to verify.
A Strange Creation
This Bear Drama is a somewhat odd beast. It conjures a strong impression of the bleakness that lets suspicion and prejudice and grim legends thrive from the native legend that bears might be dominated or inhabited by the souls of men. And it doesn’t idealising the hardscrabble life led by the villagers, in which brutality, whether that of nature or mankind, lurks constantly on the edges, waiting to erupt. Yet the personas seldom evolve more than ciphers – or maybe, while the conflicts between justice and revenge, logic and faith, virtue and evil escalate, representative characters in a fable – preventing the entire production fully becoming immersive.
Stylistic Shifts
And then, there are numerous stylistically clashing moments where the pastor’s ability in finding evidence and discern Hilda’s fate becomes nearly laughable. He positions himself observing broken milk pots and strands of fur within storage sheds like a combined Hercule Poirot and Sherlock Holmes – alongside Jussi a rather hapless Hastings-cum-Watson (neither of whom were required to taste a mixture of blood droplets and the boss’s spit to confirm that, yes, it was definitely dried blood at the crime scene), prior to declaring his latest deduction and extracting a body out of a swamp.
Clashing Agendas
The village elite are bent on demonstrating that the maid was killed by a bear, maybe to preserve the calm, or possibly to shield a fellow elite. The clergyman is bent on proving the opposite, and the proof so rapidly accumulates in his favour that once more the drama’s plausibility and audience tolerance get strained. In its finest moments, the series is reminiscent of the adaptation a few years ago of Sarah Perry’s the serpent tale, through its portrayal of the opposing attractions and terrors presented by rational thought and belief. At its worst, it’s more like a bear-themed police procedural. Still, it appears to provide the answer to the earlier query: “Females, choose the animal.”
The series is on Disney+ currently.
