A intense debate recently went viral on social media, after someone posed the question for females: would you rather find yourself stranded in a forest with a man or with a bear? Like all the best thought experiments, it revealed vastly opposing perspectives and experiences, highlighted chasms among genders, and could easily to induce an existential crisis if you thought on it for too long. There was also the predictable coda where men of a certain stripe came online to inform women how stupid they had been to select the bear and proceeded to describe the punishments they deserved for that choice. This at least enabled those females who had been hesitating over their choice to make it with a new confidence.
Dramatising the Scenario
To Cook a Bear skillfully brings to life this nifty small premise. The six-part series is adapted from Swedish author Mikael Niemi’s 2018 book with the identical title (translated in 2020 for English readers). It traces the struggles of a pastor (the lead actor) and his family as they come to begin a fresh religious post within Kengis, a remote village in Sweden’s north, in 1852. Within a community with few pleasures, not one of the locals especially warm to his puritanical stance on drinking and revelry, but it is his defense of the poor – especially the native Sami population, from which comes the preacher’s adopted son Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in social justice and equal rights that sets him in direct opposition with the Kengis local authorities.
The Opposing Forces
Soon collaborating opposing him are the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the fearsome factory proprietor Madam Sjödahl (Pernilla August), seen early on firing a recently mangled laborer with minimal compensation while he is still babbling at the sight his crushed hand, and anyone else who profit from a community easily swayed with some containers of the whisky provided by the creepy store owner Lindmark (the actor). However, in fairness, Lindmark’s eeriness diminishes once itinerant painter Beronius appears in the story (the performer, delivering an acting turn of exceptional unsettling intensity). While they remain – similar to the clergyman – only a little more being stereotypes, they are at least effective ones.
Narrative Development
Once the foundations of conflict sown, it is time to get down with the storyline. The servant from the doctor’s house, Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), accordingly vanishes in the forest. Indications of her flight and animal scratches upon a trunk get discovered but she is nowhere to be seen. Rumours and anxieties regarding a human-devouring beast roaming the woodland circulate, yet the clergyman holds a different view that he and Jussi set out to prove.
A Strange Creation
This Bear Drama is a slightly odd beast. It conjures a strong impression of the bleakness that allows distrust and prejudice and dark myths thrive based on local folklore that animals can be controlled or possessed by the spirits of men. It avoids idealising the hardscrabble life led by the residents, where violence, whether that of the wild or mankind, lurks constantly on the edges, poised to explode. But the characters seldom evolve beyond symbols – or maybe, as the struggles amid fairness and revenge, rationality and faith, virtue and evil intensify, representative characters within a moral tale – which stops the whole thing truly coming to life.
Stylistic Shifts
Additionally, there are numerous stylistically clashing moments in which the pastor’s ability to discover clues and determine the maid’s destiny becomes almost risible. He positions himself looking at broken milk pots and strands of fur in hay barns as a fusion of the Belgian detective the English sleuth – alongside Jussi a particularly unfortunate Hastings-cum-Watson (neither of whom had to lick a blend of blood droplets and saliva from his superior to confirm that, yes, it was clearly dried blood on the site), prior to declaring his latest deduction and extracting a corpse from a bog.
Opposing Goals
The village elite are bent on demonstrating that the maid met her end by a bear, perhaps to preserve the calm, or possibly to shield a fellow elite. The clergyman is intent on proving the opposite, and the evidence so rapidly accumulates supporting his view that again the show’s credibility and audience tolerance get strained. In its finest moments, the series evokes memories of the TV version some years back of the author’s The Essex Serpent, through its portrayal of the competing attractions and terrors presented by science and belief. In its low points, it’s more like Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Nevertheless, it does seem to provide the answer to the earlier query: “Ladies, take the bear.”
The series streams on Disney+ currently.
