An heated discussion recently spread widely on social media, after someone asked a query to women: would you rather be lost in the woods with a man or a bear? Similar to the best thought experiments, it exposed wildly different worldviews and experiences, highlighted chasms between the sexes, and could easily to induce a deep personal dilemma for anyone pondering on it extensively. There was also the predictable follow-up in which men of a certain stripe came online to tell women how stupid they had been for choosing the animal and proceeded to limn the punishments they merited for it. This at minimum enabled those females who were uncertain over their choice to decide with renewed assurance.
Dramatising the Scenario
To Cook a Bear effectively dramatises this clever little setup. The six-part series is adapted from Scandinavian writer Mikael Niemi’s 2018 book with the identical title (rendered two years later for an English audience). It follows the tribulations of a pastor (the lead actor) and his family as they come to start a new ministry in Kengis, a remote settlement in Sweden’s north, in 1852. Within a community lacking many joys, none of the inhabitants particularly warm to his puritanical approach to drinking and dancing, but it is his defense of the poor – especially the native Sami population, from which hails the pastor’s foster child the youth Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in societal fairness and equality that sets him on a collision course with the Kengis local authorities.
The Opposing Forces
Soon in cahoots against him include the lawman Brahe (the performer), the intimidating mill owner Madam Sjödahl (Pernilla August), observed initially firing a newly injured worker with a month’s pay while he is still gibbering upon seeing his crushed hand, and anyone else who profit from a community who can be bought for a few bottles of the whisky sold by the creepy store owner Lindmark (the actor). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s creepiness pales once travelling artist Beronius appears in the story (Simon J Berger, delivering an acting turn of rare unsettling intensity). While they remain – like the pastor himself – just slightly beyond being stereotypes, they still serve as effective ones.
Plot Progression
Once the foundations of conflict planted, the moment arrives to proceed to narrative business. The maid from the doctor’s house, the character Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), accordingly goes missing in the forest. Indications of her flight and animal scratches upon a trunk get discovered yet she remains nowhere to be seen. Gossip and fears regarding a human-devouring beast prowling the woodland circulate, but the pastor has another theory that he and Jussi embark to verify.
An Odd Beast
This Bear Drama is a somewhat peculiar show. It creates a fine sense of the bleakness that allows distrust and bias and dark myths flourish from the native legend that bears might be dominated or inhabited by the spirits of men. It avoids romanticise the hardscrabble life experienced by the residents, where violence, whether that of the wild or mankind, always looms at the periphery, poised to explode. Yet the personas seldom evolve more than ciphers – or perhaps, while the conflicts between justice and vengeance, logic and religion, good and evil intensify, emblematic figures within a moral tale – preventing the entire production fully coming to life.
Tonal Inconsistencies
And then, exist the many tonally jarring moments where the pastor’s ability in finding evidence and determine the maid’s destiny becomes almost risible. He positions himself observing shattered containers and clumps of hair in hay barns as a fusion of Hercule Poirot the English sleuth – alongside Jussi a rather hapless Hastings-cum-Watson (none of whom were required to lick a blend of blood droplets and the boss’s spit to confirm that indeed, it was definitely dried blood on the site), prior to declaring his latest deduction and pulling a corpse out of a swamp.
Opposing Goals
The local leaders are determined proving that the maid was killed by a bear, perhaps to protect the peace, perhaps to shield one of their own. The clergyman is intent on proving otherwise, and the evidence so rapidly accumulates in his favour that again the drama’s plausibility and audience tolerance get strained. At its best, To Cook a Bear is reminiscent of the adaptation some years back of the author’s the serpent tale, with its evocation of the competing attractions and terrors offered by rational thought and religion. In its low points, it resembles a bear-themed police procedural. Still, it appears to provide the response to that debated question: “Females, choose the animal.”
To Cook a Bear streams on Disney+ currently.
