A heated discussion lately spread widely on social media, following a user posed a query to women: which would you prefer find yourself stranded in the woods with a man or a bear? Like all the best thought experiments, it exposed vastly opposing worldviews and experiences, highlighted divides among genders, and could easily cause a deep personal dilemma if you thought about it for too long. There was also the almost inevitable coda where some males took to the internet to tell women how stupid they had been to select the animal and went on to limn the consequences they merited for that choice. This at minimum enabled those females who had been hesitating about their decision to make it with a new confidence.
Dramatising the Setup
To Cook a Bear effectively dramatises this nifty small premise. This six-episode series is based from Scandinavian writer Mikael Niemi’s 2018 book of the same name (translated in 2020 for an English audience). It traces the tribulations of a clergyman (the lead actor) and his household 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 especially warm to his puritanical approach to drinking and dancing, but it is his defense of impoverished people – especially the indigenous Sami, from among whom hails the pastor’s adopted son Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his conviction in social justice and equality that sets him in direct opposition with the Kengis powers that be.
The Antagonists
Soon collaborating against him include the lawman Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the intimidating factory proprietor Madam Sjödahl (the actress), observed initially firing a recently mangled laborer with minimal compensation as he remains gibbering at the sight his crushed hand, and all others who profit from a community easily swayed for a few bottles of the whisky provided by the creepy store owner Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). Although, to be fair, Lindmark’s eeriness diminishes once itinerant painter Beronius arrives on the scene (Simon J Berger, delivering an acting turn of exceptional discomfiting power). While they remain – like the pastor himself – just slightly beyond being stereotypes, they still serve as effective ones.
Narrative Development
With the seeds of tension planted, it is time to proceed with the storyline. The maid employed by the doctor, Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), accordingly goes missing in the forest. Indications of her escape and bear markings on a tree are found but she is nowhere to be seen. Rumours and anxieties of a man/maid-eating beast roaming the woods spread, but the pastor has another theory which he and his ward embark to verify.
An Odd Beast
To Cook a Bear is a slightly odd beast. It creates a strong impression of the desolation that lets distrust and bias and grim legends flourish based on local folklore that animals might be dominated or possessed by the spirits of humans. It avoids idealising the hardscrabble life experienced by the residents, in which brutality, be it from nature or mankind, always looms at the periphery, poised to explode. But the characters rarely become beyond symbols – or perhaps, while the conflicts between justice and vengeance, logic and faith, virtue and wickedness escalate, emblematic figures in a fable – preventing the whole thing truly becoming immersive.
Stylistic Shifts
Additionally, there are the many stylistically clashing moments where the clergyman’s skill in finding evidence and determine Hilda’s fate becomes almost risible. He positions himself looking at broken milk pots and clumps of hair within storage sheds like a combined Hercule Poirot the English sleuth – with Jussi a rather hapless Hastings-cum-Watson (neither of whom had to lick a mixture of blood spatter and the boss’s spit to agree that indeed, it was clearly coagulated blood on the site), prior to declaring his latest deduction and extracting a corpse from a bog.
Opposing Goals
The local leaders are determined demonstrating that Hilda was killed by a bear, maybe to preserve the calm, or possibly to shield a fellow elite. The pastor is bent on proving the opposite, and the proof so rapidly accumulates in his favour that again the drama’s plausibility and audience tolerance get strained. In its finest moments, the series evokes memories of the TV version a few years ago of the author’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the competing allures and fears offered by rational thought and belief. At its worst, it resembles Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Nevertheless, it appears to offer the response to the earlier query: “Ladies, take the bear.”
To Cook a Bear is on Disney+ now.
