An intense discussion lately went viral on social media, after a user asked a query to women: which would you prefer find yourself stranded in the woods alongside a male or with a bear? Similar to the best hypothetical scenarios, it revealed vastly opposing perspectives and life encounters, highlighted divides between the sexes, and could easily to induce an existential crisis if you thought on it for too long. There was also the predictable follow-up where some males took to the internet to inform females how foolish they had been to select the bear and went on to limn the punishments they deserved for it. This at least allowed those females who had been hesitating about their decision to decide 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 novel of the same name (translated two years later for an English audience). It follows the tribulations of a clergyman (the lead actor) and his household when they arrive to begin a new ministry within Kengis, a remote village in northern Sweden, during the mid-19th century. Within a community lacking many joys, none of the locals particularly appreciate his puritanical approach to alcohol and dancing, but it is his protection of the poor – especially the indigenous Sami, from which hails the preacher’s foster child the youth Jussi (the young actor) – and his belief in societal fairness and equal rights that places him in direct opposition with the Kengis powers that be.
The Opposing Forces
Quickly collaborating against him include the lawman the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the intimidating factory proprietor Madam Sjödahl (the actress), observed initially dismissing a newly injured laborer with a month’s pay while he is still babbling upon seeing of his pulped hand, and anyone else who benefit from a populace easily swayed with some containers of the whisky provided by the unsettling shopkeeper the merchant Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). Although, to be fair, Lindmark’s eeriness pales when travelling artist Beronius appears on the scene (Simon J Berger, delivering a performance of exceptional discomfiting power). While they remain – like the pastor himself – only a little more being stereotypes, they still serve as effective ones.
Narrative Development
Once the foundations of conflict sown, the moment arrives to get down to narrative business. The maid employed by the doctor, the character Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), accordingly goes missing in the forest. Signs of her flight and animal scratches on a tree are found but she is completely absent. Gossip and anxieties of a man/maid-eating beast roaming the woodland circulate, yet the clergyman has another theory that he and Jussi set out to verify.
A Strange Creation
To Cook a Bear is a somewhat odd beast. It creates a fine sense of the bleakness that lets distrust and bias and grim legends thrive from the native legend that bears might be dominated or inhabited by the souls of men. And it doesn’t idealising the hardscrabble life led by the residents, where violence, whether that of the wild or people, lurks constantly at the periphery, waiting to erupt. Yet the personas seldom evolve more than ciphers – or maybe, while the conflicts between justice and vengeance, rationality and faith, virtue and evil escalate, representative characters in a fable – preventing the entire production truly coming to life.
Stylistic Shifts
Additionally, exist numerous tonally jarring instances where the pastor’s ability in finding evidence and determine the maid’s destiny becomes nearly laughable. He stands observing broken milk pots and strands of fur in hay barns like a combined Hercule Poirot and Sherlock Holmes – with Jussi a rather hapless Hastings-cum-Watson (none of whom were required to taste a mixture of blood droplets and saliva from his superior to agree that, yes, it was definitely coagulated blood on the site), before announcing his latest deduction and extracting a corpse from a bog.
Clashing Agendas
The village elite are bent on proving that Hilda met her end by a bear, perhaps to preserve the calm, or possibly to shield a fellow elite. The clergyman is bent on establishing the opposite, and the evidence so quickly stacks up supporting his view that once more the show’s credibility and audience tolerance are tested. At its best, the series is reminiscent of the adaptation some years back of the author’s The Essex Serpent, through its portrayal of the opposing attractions and fears offered by science and religion. At its worst, it’s more like a bear-themed police procedural. Still, it appears to provide the response to the earlier query: “Ladies, take the bear.”
The series is on Disney+ currently.
