An intense debate lately spread widely across online platforms, after a user asked a query to women: would you rather find yourself stranded in the woods with a man or with a bear? Like all the most engaging hypothetical scenarios, it exposed vastly opposing worldviews and life encounters, highlighted chasms between the sexes, and was likely to induce an existential crisis if you thought about it for too long. Additionally, there came the predictable follow-up where men of a certain stripe took to the internet to tell females how foolish they had been for choosing the animal and proceeded to limn the consequences they merited for it. This at minimum allowed the women who were uncertain over their choice to make it with renewed assurance.
Dramatising the Setup
To Cook a Bear effectively dramatises this clever small premise. This six-episode drama is based from Swedish author Mikael Niemi’s 2018 book with the identical title (rendered two years later for English readers). It traces the struggles of a clergyman (the lead actor) and his family as they come to begin a fresh religious post in Kengis, an isolated village in northern Sweden, during the mid-19th century. Within a community with few pleasures, none of the inhabitants especially warm to his strict stance on alcohol and dancing, but it is his defense of impoverished people – particularly the native Sami population, from among whom comes the pastor’s foster child Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in societal fairness and equality that places him on a collision course against the Kengis powers that be.
The Antagonists
Soon collaborating opposing him are the sheriff the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the fearsome mill owner Madam Sjödahl (Pernilla August), seen initially firing a newly injured laborer with minimal compensation while he is still babbling upon seeing his crushed hand, and anyone else who profit from a populace who can be bought for a few bottles of the whisky provided by the unsettling shopkeeper the merchant Lindmark (the actor). Although, to be fair, Lindmark’s creepiness diminishes when itinerant painter the artist Beronius arrives in the story (Simon J Berger, delivering a performance of exceptional discomfiting power). While they remain – similar to the clergyman – just slightly beyond being stereotypes, they still serve as potent archetypes.
Plot Progression
Once the foundations of tension sown, the moment arrives to get down with the storyline. The maid from the doctor’s house, Hilda (the actress), duly vanishes in the forest. Indications of her flight and bear markings on a tree get discovered but she is completely absent. Rumours and anxieties regarding a human-devouring bear roaming the woodland spread, yet the clergyman has another theory which he and his ward set out to verify.
An Odd Beast
This Bear Drama is a slightly peculiar show. It creates a strong impression of the desolation that allows suspicion and prejudice and grim legends thrive based on local folklore that bears might be dominated or possessed by the souls of humans. It avoids idealising the tough existence experienced by the residents, where violence, be it from nature or mankind, lurks constantly on the edges, poised to explode. Yet the personas rarely become more than ciphers – or perhaps, as the struggles between justice and vengeance, logic and religion, good and wickedness escalate, representative characters in a fable – which stops the entire production fully becoming immersive.
Stylistic Shifts
And then, exist numerous tonally jarring instances in which the clergyman’s skill to discover clues and discern Hilda’s fate becomes almost risible. He positions himself looking at shattered containers and clumps of hair in hay barns as a fusion of the Belgian detective and Sherlock Holmes – alongside Jussi a rather hapless assistant figure (neither of whom were required to taste a mixture of blood droplets and saliva from his superior to confirm that, yes, it was definitely dried blood on the site), before announcing his latest deduction and pulling a corpse from a bog.
Opposing Goals
The village elite are bent on demonstrating that Hilda met her end by an animal, perhaps to preserve the peace, or possibly to protect one of their own. The pastor is intent on establishing otherwise, and the evidence so quickly stacks up in his favour that once more the show’s credibility and audience tolerance get strained. At its best, the series evokes memories of the TV version some years back of the author’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the opposing attractions and terrors offered by science and religion. In its low points, it resembles a bear-themed police procedural. Nevertheless, it does seem to offer the response to that debated question: “Females, choose the animal.”
To Cook a Bear is on Disney+ currently.
