A intense discussion lately went viral across online platforms, following a user posed a query to women: which would you prefer find yourself stranded in the woods alongside a male or a bear? Like all the best hypothetical scenarios, it exposed vastly opposing perspectives and experiences, highlighted divides between the sexes, and could easily cause a deep personal dilemma if you thought about it for too long. Additionally, there came the almost inevitable coda in which men of a certain stripe came online to tell women how foolish they were to select the bear and went on to describe the punishments they merited for that choice. This at least enabled the women who were uncertain over their choice to decide with renewed assurance.
Portraying the Setup
To Cook a Bear skillfully brings to life this nifty small premise. This six-episode drama is adapted on Swedish author Mikael Niemi’s 2018 novel of the same name (translated two years later for English readers). It traces the tribulations of a pastor (the lead actor) and his family when they arrive to begin a fresh religious post in Kengis, a remote village in northern Sweden, in 1852. In a place lacking many joys, not one of the inhabitants especially warm to his puritanical approach to drinking and revelry, but it is his defense of the poor – particularly the indigenous Sami, from among whom hails the pastor’s foster child Jussi (the young actor) – and his belief in social justice and equal rights that sets him on a collision course with the Kengis local authorities.
The Opposing Forces
Quickly collaborating opposing him are the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the fearsome factory proprietor Madam Sjödahl (Pernilla August), seen early on dismissing a recently mangled worker with a month’s pay as he remains babbling at the sight of his pulped hand, and anyone else who benefit from a community who can be bought for a few bottles of liquor provided by the creepy store owner Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). Although, in fairness, Lindmark’s eeriness diminishes when itinerant painter Beronius arrives in the story (the performer, providing an acting turn of exceptional unsettling intensity). While they remain – like the pastor himself – just slightly beyond than caricatures, they still serve as potent archetypes.
Plot Progression
With the seeds of tension sown, the moment arrives to proceed to narrative business. The maid from the doctor’s house, the character Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), duly goes missing in the forest. Indications of her flight and animal scratches on a tree are found but she is nowhere to be seen. Gossip and fears of a man/maid-eating bear roaming the woods circulate, yet the clergyman holds a different view that he and Jussi set out to prove.
A Strange Creation
This Bear Drama is a somewhat odd beast. It creates a fine sense of the desolation that lets suspicion and bias and dark myths thrive from the native legend that animals might be dominated or inhabited by the spirits of humans. And it doesn’t idealising the tough existence experienced by the villagers, where brutality, be it from nature or people, always looms at the periphery, poised to explode. But the characters seldom evolve beyond symbols – or perhaps, while the conflicts amid fairness and revenge, logic and religion, virtue and wickedness escalate, emblematic figures in a fable – which stops the entire production fully becoming immersive.
Tonal Inconsistencies
And then, exist the many stylistically clashing moments where the pastor’s ability in finding evidence and discern Hilda’s fate turns almost risible. He stands looking at shattered containers and strands of fur in hay barns like a combined Hercule Poirot the English sleuth – with Jussi a rather hapless Hastings-cum-Watson (none of whom were required to lick a blend of blood droplets and saliva from his superior to agree that, yes, it was clearly dried blood at the crime scene), before announcing his newest conclusion and extracting a body out of a swamp.
Opposing Goals
The village elite are determined demonstrating that the maid was killed by an animal, maybe to preserve the calm, perhaps to protect a fellow elite. The pastor is bent on proving the opposite, and the evidence so quickly stacks up supporting his view that again the show’s credibility and audience tolerance get strained. At its best, the series evokes memories of the adaptation a few years ago of the author’s the serpent tale, through its portrayal of the opposing attractions and fears offered by science and religion. In its low points, it resembles Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Nevertheless, it appears to offer the response to that debated question: “Ladies, take the bear.”
The series streams on Disney+ currently.
