A heated discussion recently went viral across online platforms, following someone posed the question for females: would you rather be lost in the woods with a man or a bear? Like all the most engaging thought experiments, it revealed vastly opposing perspectives and life encounters, illuminated divides between the sexes, and was likely to induce an existential crisis for anyone pondering on it for too long. Additionally, there came the almost inevitable coda in which some males took to the internet to tell women how stupid they were for choosing the animal and proceeded to describe the consequences they merited for that choice. This at minimum enabled those females who had been hesitating about their decision to decide with a new confidence.
Portraying the Setup
To Cook a Bear effectively dramatises this clever little setup. The six-part series is based from Scandinavian writer Mikael Niemi’s 2018 book with the identical title (translated two years later for an English audience). It follows the struggles of a clergyman (the lead actor) and his household when they arrive to start a new ministry within Kengis, an isolated village in northern Sweden, during the mid-19th century. In a place with few pleasures, not one of the inhabitants particularly appreciate his puritanical approach to drinking and dancing, yet it is his protection of impoverished people – especially the indigenous Sami, from among whom comes the preacher’s adopted son Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his conviction in social justice and equality that sets him on a collision course against the Kengis local authorities.
The Antagonists
Quickly in cahoots opposing him include the lawman Brahe (the performer), the fearsome mill owner Madam Sjödahl (Pernilla August), seen early on firing a recently mangled worker with minimal compensation as he remains gibbering at the sight of his pulped hand, and anyone else who profit from a community who can be bought for a few bottles of liquor provided by the unsettling store owner Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). Although, in fairness, Lindmark’s eeriness diminishes when itinerant painter Beronius appears on the scene (Simon J Berger, delivering an acting turn of rare discomfiting power). If they are – like the pastor himself – only a little more than caricatures, they are at least potent archetypes.
Plot Progression
With the seeds of tension sown, it is time to proceed to narrative business. The maid from the doctor’s house, the character Hilda (the actress), accordingly vanishes in the forest. Indications of her flight and bear markings on a tree are found but she is completely absent. Rumours and anxieties regarding a human-devouring bear roaming the woods spread, but the pastor has another theory which he and his ward set out to verify.
An Odd Beast
This Bear Drama is a somewhat odd beast. It creates a fine sense of the bleakness that allows suspicion and prejudice and dark myths flourish from the native legend that bears might be dominated or possessed by the spirits of humans. It avoids romanticise the hardscrabble life experienced by the residents, in which brutality, whether that of the wild or people, lurks constantly at the periphery, waiting to erupt. But the characters seldom evolve beyond symbols – or maybe, as the struggles between justice and vengeance, rationality and religion, virtue and wickedness escalate, emblematic figures within a moral tale – which stops the whole thing truly becoming immersive.
Tonal Inconsistencies
Additionally, there are the many stylistically clashing instances where the clergyman’s skill in finding evidence and determine the maid’s destiny becomes almost risible. He positions himself observing broken milk pots and clumps of hair within storage sheds like a combined the Belgian detective the English sleuth – alongside Jussi a particularly unfortunate assistant figure (neither of whom were required to taste a blend of blood droplets and the boss’s spit to agree that indeed, it was clearly coagulated blood at the crime scene), prior to declaring his latest deduction and pulling a body from a bog.
Clashing Agendas
The village elite are bent on demonstrating that the maid met her end by a bear, maybe to preserve the peace, or possibly to shield one of their own. The pastor is intent on establishing the opposite, and the proof so quickly accumulates in his favour that again the show’s credibility and the viewer’s patience get strained. In its finest moments, the series is reminiscent of the TV version some years back of Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, through its portrayal of the competing allures and fears offered by rational thought and religion. At its worst, it resembles Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Nevertheless, it appears to provide the response to the earlier query: “Ladies, take the bear.”
The series streams on Disney+ now.
