A intense debate lately spread widely across online platforms, after someone posed a query to women: would you rather find yourself stranded in the woods alongside a male or a bear? Like all the best hypothetical scenarios, it exposed wildly different perspectives and life encounters, illuminated chasms among genders, and was likely to induce a deep personal dilemma for anyone pondering on it for too long. There was also the almost inevitable coda where some males came online to tell women how stupid they had been for choosing the animal and proceeded to limn the punishments they merited for that choice. This at minimum enabled the women who had been hesitating about their decision to decide with a new confidence.
Portraying the Setup
To Cook a Bear skillfully brings to life this clever little setup. The six-part drama is based on Scandinavian writer Mikael Niemi’s 2018 book of the same name (rendered in 2020 for an English audience). It traces the tribulations of a pastor (the lead actor) and his family as they come to start a new ministry in Kengis, an isolated village in Sweden’s north, in 1852. In a place with few pleasures, not one of the locals particularly warm to his puritanical approach to drinking and revelry, yet it is his defense of impoverished people – particularly the native Sami population, from which comes the pastor’s adopted son the youth Jussi (the young actor) – and his belief in social justice and equal rights that sets him in direct opposition against the Kengis powers that be.
The Opposing Forces
Soon in cahoots opposing him include the lawman the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the intimidating factory proprietor Madam Sjödahl (the actress), observed initially dismissing a recently mangled worker with minimal compensation while he is still gibbering at the sight his crushed hand, and anyone else who benefit from a populace who can be bought with some containers of liquor sold by the creepy store owner the merchant Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s creepiness pales when travelling artist Beronius arrives in the story (the performer, delivering an acting turn of exceptional unsettling intensity). If they are – similar to the clergyman – just slightly beyond being stereotypes, they are at least potent archetypes.
Plot Progression
Once the foundations of tension planted, it is time to proceed to narrative business. The servant from the doctor’s house, Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), accordingly goes missing from the woods. Signs of her escape and animal scratches upon a trunk get discovered but she is completely absent. Rumours and fears of a man/maid-eating bear prowling the woodland circulate, but the pastor has another theory which he and his ward set out to verify.
A Strange Creation
This Bear Drama is a somewhat peculiar show. It conjures a strong impression of the bleakness that lets distrust and bias and dark myths flourish based on local folklore that bears might be dominated or possessed by the spirits of men. And it doesn’t romanticise the tough existence led by the villagers, in which violence, whether that of nature or people, always looms at the periphery, poised to explode. But the characters rarely become more than ciphers – or maybe, as the struggles amid fairness and revenge, logic and faith, virtue and wickedness intensify, representative characters within a moral tale – preventing the entire production fully becoming immersive.
Tonal Inconsistencies
And then, exist the many tonally jarring moments where the pastor’s ability in finding evidence and discern Hilda’s fate turns almost risible. He positions himself observing broken milk pots and strands of fur within storage sheds as a fusion of the Belgian detective and Sherlock Holmes – with Jussi a particularly unfortunate Hastings-cum-Watson (none of whom had to taste a blend of blood spatter and saliva from his superior to agree that, yes, it was definitely dried blood at the crime scene), prior to declaring his latest deduction and extracting a corpse out of a swamp.
Opposing Goals
The village elite are bent on proving that Hilda met her end by a bear, perhaps to preserve the calm, perhaps to protect a fellow elite. The pastor is bent on establishing otherwise, and the evidence so rapidly accumulates supporting his view that once more the drama’s plausibility and audience tolerance are tested. At its best, the series is reminiscent of the TV version some years back of the author’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the competing attractions and fears presented by science and religion. In its low points, it resembles Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Still, it does seem to provide the answer to the earlier query: “Females, choose the animal.”
To Cook a Bear streams on Disney+ now.
