A intense discussion lately went viral across online platforms, after a user posed a query for females: which would you prefer be lost in the woods with a man or with a bear? Like all the best thought experiments, it revealed vastly opposing worldviews and life encounters, illuminated divides between the sexes, and could easily cause an existential crisis for anyone pondering about it for too long. There was also the almost inevitable coda where some males took to the internet to inform women how stupid they were to select the bear and went on to describe the punishments they deserved for it. This at least allowed those females who had been hesitating about their decision to decide with a new confidence.
Dramatising the Setup
To Cook a Bear skillfully brings to life this clever little setup. This six-episode drama is based on Scandinavian writer Mikael Niemi’s 2018 novel with the identical title (translated two years later for English readers). It follows the struggles of a clergyman (the lead actor) and his family as they come to begin a new ministry in Kengis, a remote village in northern Sweden, in 1852. Within a community lacking many joys, not one of the locals particularly warm to his strict approach to drinking and revelry, but it is his defense of impoverished people – especially the native Sami population, from among whom comes the preacher’s foster child Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his conviction in societal fairness and equal rights that sets him on a collision course with the Kengis local authorities.
The Antagonists
Soon collaborating opposing him include the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the fearsome factory proprietor Madam Sjödahl (Pernilla August), observed initially firing a recently mangled worker with minimal compensation as he remains babbling at the sight of his pulped hand, and anyone else who benefit from a populace who can be bought with some containers of liquor sold by the unsettling store owner Lindmark (the actor). However, in fairness, Lindmark’s eeriness diminishes when itinerant painter the artist Beronius arrives on the scene (Simon J Berger, delivering an acting turn of rare discomfiting power). While they remain – similar to the clergyman – only a little more than caricatures, they are at least effective ones.
Plot Progression
With the seeds of tension planted, it is time to proceed to narrative business. The maid from the doctor’s house, Hilda (the actress), accordingly vanishes from the woods. Signs of her flight and bear markings on a tree get discovered yet she remains nowhere to be seen. Rumours and anxieties of a man/maid-eating bear prowling the woods spread, but the pastor has another theory which he and his ward set out to verify.
A Strange Creation
This Bear Drama is a slightly peculiar show. It creates a fine sense of the bleakness that allows suspicion and bias and grim legends flourish based on local folklore that animals might be dominated or inhabited by the spirits of humans. It avoids idealising the tough existence experienced by the residents, where brutality, whether that of nature or mankind, always looms at the periphery, waiting to erupt. But the characters rarely become beyond symbols – or maybe, while the conflicts between justice and vengeance, logic and faith, virtue and wickedness escalate, representative characters in a fable – which stops the whole thing fully coming to life.
Tonal Inconsistencies
Additionally, there are numerous tonally jarring instances where the pastor’s ability to discover clues and discern Hilda’s fate becomes almost risible. He stands looking at broken milk pots and strands of fur in hay barns as a fusion of Hercule Poirot and Sherlock Holmes – alongside Jussi a rather hapless Hastings-cum-Watson (none of whom had to taste a mixture of blood spatter and saliva from his superior to confirm that indeed, it was clearly coagulated blood at the crime scene), before announcing his newest conclusion and extracting a corpse out of a swamp.
Clashing Agendas
The local leaders are bent on demonstrating that the maid was killed by an animal, maybe to preserve the peace, or possibly to protect a fellow elite. The clergyman is bent on establishing the opposite, and the evidence so quickly accumulates supporting his view that once more the show’s credibility and the viewer’s patience are tested. In its finest moments, the series evokes memories of the adaptation a few years ago of Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, through its portrayal of the opposing attractions and fears offered by rational thought and belief. In its low points, it resembles a bear-themed police procedural. Still, it does seem to offer the answer to that debated question: “Ladies, take the bear.”
The series is on Disney+ currently.
