An heated discussion lately went viral across online platforms, after someone posed a query for females: would you rather be lost in the woods alongside a male or with a bear? Like all the most engaging thought experiments, it exposed wildly different worldviews and experiences, illuminated chasms among genders, and was likely cause a deep personal dilemma for anyone pondering about it extensively. There was also the almost inevitable coda where some males came online to tell females how stupid they were for choosing the animal and proceeded to limn the consequences they deserved for that choice. This at least allowed those females who were uncertain about their decision to decide with renewed assurance.
Dramatising the Setup
To Cook a Bear effectively brings to life this nifty small premise. The six-part drama is based on Scandinavian writer Mikael Niemi’s 2018 book with the identical title (translated in 2020 for an English audience). It traces the tribulations of a pastor (the lead actor) and his family as they come to begin a fresh religious post within Kengis, a remote village in Sweden’s north, during the mid-19th century. In a place with few pleasures, not one of the inhabitants especially warm to his strict stance on alcohol and revelry, yet it is his protection of impoverished people – particularly the indigenous Sami, from which comes the pastor’s foster child Jussi (the young actor) – and his conviction in societal fairness and equal rights that places him in direct opposition against the Kengis powers that be.
The Antagonists
Soon collaborating against him are the sheriff the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the fearsome factory proprietor Madam Sjödahl (Pernilla August), seen early on firing a newly injured laborer with minimal compensation while he is still gibbering at the sight his crushed hand, and all others who benefit from a populace easily swayed with some containers of the whisky provided by the unsettling store owner the merchant Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s eeriness diminishes once travelling artist Beronius arrives in the story (the performer, delivering a performance of rare unsettling intensity). While they remain – like the pastor himself – only a little more being stereotypes, they still serve as effective ones.
Plot Progression
With the seeds of tension planted, it is time to get down to narrative business. The maid from the doctor’s house, the character Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), duly goes missing from the woods. Signs of her flight and bear markings upon a trunk get discovered but she is completely absent. Rumours and fears of a man/maid-eating bear roaming the woods spread, but the pastor holds a different view that he and Jussi set out to verify.
A Strange Creation
This Bear Drama is a somewhat peculiar show. It creates a fine sense of the desolation that lets suspicion and bias and dark myths flourish based on local folklore that animals can be controlled or inhabited by the souls of men. And it doesn’t romanticise the tough existence led by the residents, where brutality, whether that of nature or people, lurks constantly at the periphery, poised to explode. Yet the personas rarely become beyond symbols – or perhaps, as the struggles amid fairness and vengeance, logic and religion, virtue and wickedness escalate, emblematic figures within a moral tale – preventing the entire production truly coming to life.
Tonal Inconsistencies
And then, exist the many tonally jarring moments in which the pastor’s ability to discover clues and discern the maid’s destiny turns almost risible. He stands observing broken milk pots and strands of fur within storage sheds like a combined Hercule Poirot and Sherlock Holmes – with Jussi a rather hapless assistant figure (none of whom were required to lick a mixture of blood droplets and the boss’s spit to confirm that indeed, it was clearly dried blood on the site), before announcing his newest conclusion and pulling a corpse from a bog.
Opposing Goals
The village elite are bent on demonstrating that the maid met her end by a bear, maybe to protect the peace, or possibly to protect a fellow elite. The pastor is intent on establishing otherwise, and the proof so quickly stacks up supporting his view that once more the show’s credibility and the viewer’s patience get strained. At its best, the series evokes memories of the adaptation a few years ago of the author’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the opposing allures and terrors offered by rational thought and religion. At its worst, it’s more like Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Still, it appears to offer the response to that debated question: “Ladies, take the bear.”
The series is on Disney+ currently.
