An heated debate lately spread widely on social media, after someone asked a query to women: which would you prefer find yourself stranded in the woods alongside a male or with a bear? Like all the most engaging thought experiments, it revealed wildly different perspectives and experiences, highlighted chasms between the sexes, and was likely cause a deep personal dilemma if you thought on it extensively. There was also the predictable follow-up in which some males came online to tell women how foolish they were to select the animal and went on to limn the consequences they merited for it. This at minimum enabled those females who had been hesitating over their choice to make it with a new confidence.
Dramatising the Setup
To Cook a Bear effectively dramatises this nifty small premise. The six-part drama is adapted on Swedish author Mikael Niemi’s 2018 book of the same name (translated in 2020 for an English audience). It traces the struggles of a clergyman (the lead actor) and his family as they come to begin a fresh religious post within Kengis, an isolated settlement in Sweden’s north, during the mid-19th century. In a place with few pleasures, none of the inhabitants especially appreciate his strict stance on alcohol and dancing, yet it is his protection of the poor – particularly the native Sami population, from which comes the pastor’s adopted son 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 Antagonists
Quickly collaborating against him include the lawman Brahe (the performer), the fearsome factory proprietor the matron Sjödahl (Pernilla August), seen initially firing a recently mangled worker with minimal compensation as he remains babbling upon seeing of his pulped hand, and all others who profit from a community easily swayed for a few bottles of the whisky provided by the unsettling store owner the merchant Lindmark (the actor). However, in fairness, Lindmark’s eeriness pales when itinerant painter the artist Beronius appears in the story (the performer, delivering a performance of rare discomfiting power). While they remain – similar to the clergyman – just slightly beyond being stereotypes, they still serve as potent archetypes.
Narrative Development
Once the foundations of tension planted, it is time to proceed with the storyline. The maid employed by the doctor, Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), duly goes missing from the woods. Indications of her escape and bear markings on a tree get discovered yet she remains nowhere to be seen. Rumours and anxieties of a man/maid-eating beast prowling the woods spread, yet the clergyman has another theory that he and Jussi embark to prove.
An Odd Beast
To Cook a Bear is a somewhat peculiar show. It creates a fine sense of the bleakness that lets suspicion and prejudice and dark myths thrive based on local folklore that animals can be controlled or inhabited by the spirits of humans. It avoids romanticise the tough existence experienced by the villagers, in which brutality, be it from the wild or people, lurks constantly on the edges, poised to explode. But the characters seldom evolve more than ciphers – or maybe, while the conflicts between justice and revenge, rationality and faith, virtue and wickedness intensify, emblematic figures within a moral tale – preventing the entire production fully coming to life.
Stylistic Shifts
And then, exist numerous tonally jarring instances where the pastor’s ability in finding evidence and discern the maid’s destiny becomes nearly laughable. He positions himself looking at shattered containers and clumps of hair in hay barns as a fusion of Hercule Poirot and Sherlock Holmes – alongside Jussi a particularly unfortunate assistant figure (none of whom were required to lick a blend 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 newest conclusion and extracting a corpse from a bog.
Clashing Agendas
The local leaders are determined demonstrating that the maid was killed by a bear, perhaps to protect the peace, perhaps to protect one of their own. The pastor is bent on proving otherwise, and the proof so rapidly stacks up supporting his view that once more the drama’s plausibility and the viewer’s patience are tested. At its best, the series evokes memories of the adaptation some years back of the author’s the serpent tale, with its evocation of the competing attractions and fears offered by science and belief. At its worst, it resembles a bear-themed police procedural. Still, it appears to offer the response to that debated question: “Ladies, take the bear.”
The series is on Disney+ currently.
