An heated debate recently spread widely across online platforms, following a user posed a query for females: would you rather find yourself stranded in the woods with a man or a bear? Similar to the best thought experiments, it revealed wildly different perspectives and life encounters, illuminated chasms among genders, and was likely to induce an existential crisis if you thought on it extensively. There was also the predictable coda where some males came online to inform women how stupid they were for choosing the animal and proceeded to describe the consequences they deserved for that choice. This at minimum allowed the women who were uncertain over their choice to decide with renewed assurance.
Dramatising the Setup
To Cook a Bear skillfully dramatises this clever little setup. This six-episode drama is adapted on Scandinavian writer Mikael Niemi’s 2018 book with the identical title (rendered two years later for English readers). It traces the struggles of a pastor (the lead actor) and his household as they come to begin a new ministry within Kengis, a remote settlement in northern Sweden, during the mid-19th century. Within a community with few pleasures, none of the locals especially warm to his strict approach to drinking and dancing, yet it is his protection of impoverished people – especially the native Sami population, from which comes the preacher’s adopted son the youth Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in societal fairness and equality that places him in direct opposition against the Kengis local authorities.
The Opposing Forces
Quickly collaborating opposing him include the lawman Brahe (the performer), the fearsome factory proprietor Madam Sjödahl (the actress), observed initially dismissing a newly injured laborer with a month’s pay as he remains babbling at the sight his crushed hand, and anyone else who profit from a community easily swayed with some containers of the whisky provided by the creepy shopkeeper the merchant Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). However, in fairness, Lindmark’s creepiness diminishes once itinerant painter the artist Beronius arrives in the story (Simon J Berger, providing a performance of exceptional unsettling intensity). While they remain – like the pastor himself – just slightly beyond being stereotypes, they are at least effective ones.
Plot Progression
With the seeds of conflict planted, it is time to get down to narrative business. The servant from the doctor’s house, Hilda (the actress), duly goes missing from the woods. Indications of her escape and animal scratches on a tree are found yet she remains completely absent. Gossip and anxieties regarding a human-devouring bear prowling the woods circulate, yet the clergyman holds a different view that he and Jussi set out to prove.
An Odd Beast
This Bear Drama is a somewhat odd beast. It creates a fine sense of the bleakness that lets distrust and prejudice and grim legends flourish from the native legend that animals can be controlled or inhabited by the spirits of men. And it doesn’t idealising the tough existence led by the residents, in which brutality, whether that of nature or mankind, always looms at the periphery, waiting to erupt. Yet the personas seldom evolve beyond symbols – or maybe, as the struggles amid fairness and vengeance, rationality and religion, good and evil intensify, representative characters in a fable – preventing the entire production truly coming to life.
Tonal Inconsistencies
And then, there are numerous tonally jarring moments where the pastor’s ability in finding evidence and discern the maid’s destiny becomes nearly laughable. He stands looking at shattered containers and clumps of hair within storage sheds as a fusion of the Belgian detective the English sleuth – alongside Jussi a particularly unfortunate Hastings-cum-Watson (neither of whom were required to lick a blend of blood droplets and the boss’s spit to confirm that indeed, it was definitely coagulated blood on the site), before announcing his latest deduction and pulling a corpse out of a swamp.
Opposing Goals
The village elite are determined proving that Hilda was killed by a bear, maybe to protect the peace, perhaps to shield a fellow elite. The pastor is bent on establishing otherwise, and the proof so quickly accumulates in his favour that again the show’s credibility and the viewer’s patience are tested. At its best, the series is reminiscent of the adaptation a few years ago of Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, through its portrayal of the competing attractions and terrors presented by rational thought and belief. In its low points, it resembles Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Nevertheless, it does seem to provide the response to the earlier query: “Females, choose the animal.”
To Cook a Bear is on Disney+ currently.
