A intense discussion lately went viral on social media, following a user posed a query for females: would you rather be lost in the woods with a man or with a bear? Like all the best hypothetical scenarios, it exposed wildly different perspectives and life encounters, highlighted chasms between the sexes, and was likely cause an existential crisis for anyone pondering on it extensively. There was also the predictable coda where some males took to the internet to inform females how stupid they had been for choosing the bear and proceeded to limn the punishments they deserved for that choice. This at least allowed those females who had been hesitating about their decision to make it with a new confidence.
Portraying the Setup
To Cook a Bear skillfully dramatises this nifty little setup. This six-episode drama is based on Swedish author Mikael Niemi’s 2018 novel with the identical title (translated in 2020 for an English audience). It follows the tribulations of a clergyman (the lead actor) and his household as they come to start a fresh religious post within Kengis, an isolated settlement in Sweden’s north, in 1852. In a place lacking many joys, none of the locals particularly appreciate his puritanical stance on drinking and revelry, yet it is his protection of impoverished people – especially the indigenous Sami, from among whom hails the pastor’s foster child Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his conviction in societal fairness and equality that places him on a collision course against the Kengis local authorities.
The Antagonists
Quickly collaborating against him include the lawman Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the fearsome factory proprietor the matron Sjödahl (Pernilla August), observed early on firing a recently mangled laborer with minimal compensation as he remains gibbering at the sight his crushed hand, and all others who profit from a populace easily swayed for a few bottles of liquor sold by the creepy shopkeeper Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). However, in fairness, Lindmark’s eeriness pales once itinerant painter the artist Beronius appears on the scene (the performer, delivering a performance of rare unsettling intensity). While they remain – like the pastor himself – only a little more being stereotypes, they are at least potent archetypes.
Narrative Development
With the seeds of tension planted, the moment arrives to get down to narrative business. The maid employed by the doctor, the character Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), accordingly vanishes from the woods. Indications of her flight and bear markings on a tree get discovered but she is nowhere to be seen. Gossip and anxieties of a man/maid-eating beast roaming the woods spread, yet the clergyman holds a different view that he and Jussi embark to verify.
A Strange Creation
To Cook a Bear is a somewhat peculiar show. It conjures a fine sense of the bleakness that lets distrust and prejudice and grim legends flourish based on local folklore that bears can be controlled or inhabited by the spirits of men. It avoids idealising the tough existence experienced by the villagers, where brutality, whether that of the wild or people, always looms on the edges, waiting to erupt. Yet the personas seldom evolve more than ciphers – or maybe, while the conflicts amid fairness and revenge, rationality and faith, virtue and evil escalate, representative characters within a moral tale – which stops the entire production truly becoming immersive.
Stylistic Shifts
And then, there are numerous stylistically clashing instances in which the pastor’s ability in finding evidence and discern Hilda’s fate turns nearly laughable. He positions himself observing broken milk pots and clumps of hair in hay barns like a combined Hercule Poirot the English sleuth – alongside Jussi a particularly unfortunate assistant figure (none of whom had to lick a blend of blood droplets and the boss’s spit to confirm that indeed, it was definitely dried blood at the crime scene), prior to declaring his newest conclusion and pulling a corpse from a bog.
Clashing Agendas
The local leaders are bent on proving that Hilda was killed by an animal, perhaps to preserve the calm, or possibly to shield a fellow elite. The pastor is intent on proving the opposite, and the evidence so rapidly accumulates in his favour that again the drama’s plausibility and audience tolerance get strained. At its best, the series is reminiscent of the adaptation a few years ago of Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the competing attractions and terrors offered by rational thought and belief. In its low points, it resembles a bear-themed police procedural. Nevertheless, it appears to offer the response to the earlier query: “Ladies, take the bear.”
To Cook a Bear streams on Disney+ now.
