A intense debate recently went viral on social media, following a user posed a query to women: would you rather be lost in the woods alongside a male or a bear? Like all the most engaging hypothetical scenarios, it exposed vastly opposing perspectives and experiences, highlighted chasms among genders, and could easily cause a deep personal dilemma if you thought about it for too long. Additionally, there came the almost inevitable follow-up where men of a certain stripe came online to tell women how stupid they were to select the animal and went on to limn the punishments they merited for that choice. This at minimum enabled the women who had been hesitating over their choice to decide with a new confidence.
Dramatising the Scenario
To Cook a Bear skillfully dramatises this clever small premise. This six-episode series is based from Scandinavian writer Mikael Niemi’s 2018 book with the identical title (translated in 2020 for English readers). It traces the struggles of a clergyman (the lead actor) and his family when they arrive to begin a new ministry within Kengis, a remote settlement in northern Sweden, during the mid-19th century. In a place lacking many joys, none of the locals especially warm to his strict stance on drinking and revelry, but it is his protection of the poor – especially the native Sami population, from which comes the preacher’s adopted son Jussi (the young actor) – and his belief in social justice and equal rights that sets him on a collision course against the Kengis local authorities.
The Opposing Forces
Soon collaborating against him are the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the intimidating factory proprietor Madam Sjödahl (the actress), seen early on firing a recently mangled laborer with minimal compensation as he remains babbling at the sight his crushed hand, and all others who profit from a populace easily swayed with some containers of liquor provided by the unsettling shopkeeper Lindmark (the actor). Although, in fairness, Lindmark’s creepiness pales once travelling 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 potent archetypes.
Plot Progression
With the seeds of tension sown, it is time to proceed to narrative business. The servant from the doctor’s house, the character Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), accordingly goes missing from the woods. Signs of her flight and bear markings on a tree are found but she is nowhere to be seen. Rumours and anxieties regarding a human-devouring bear prowling the woodland circulate, yet the clergyman holds a different view which he and his ward set out to verify.
An Odd Beast
This Bear Drama is a somewhat peculiar show. It conjures a fine sense of the bleakness that allows distrust and prejudice and grim legends thrive from the native legend that animals might be dominated or inhabited by the souls of humans. It avoids romanticise the tough existence experienced by the residents, in which brutality, whether that of nature or people, always looms at the periphery, waiting to erupt. Yet the personas seldom evolve more than ciphers – or perhaps, as the struggles amid fairness and revenge, logic and faith, virtue and wickedness intensify, representative characters in a fable – preventing the entire production truly coming to life.
Tonal Inconsistencies
And then, there are 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 strands of fur in hay barns like a combined the Belgian detective and Sherlock Holmes – with Jussi a rather hapless Hastings-cum-Watson (neither of whom had to lick a blend of blood spatter and saliva from his superior to confirm that, yes, it was definitely dried blood at the crime scene), before announcing his latest deduction and pulling a corpse from a bog.
Clashing Agendas
The village elite are determined proving that the maid was killed by an animal, perhaps to preserve the peace, perhaps to protect a fellow elite. The pastor is intent on establishing the opposite, and the proof so quickly stacks up in his favour that again the drama’s plausibility and the viewer’s patience are tested. In its finest moments, To Cook a Bear is reminiscent of the adaptation some years back of Sarah Perry’s the serpent tale, with its evocation of the competing allures and terrors presented by rational thought and religion. At its worst, it resembles Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Still, it appears to provide the answer to the earlier query: “Ladies, take the bear.”
To Cook a Bear is on Disney+ now.
