A intense debate lately spread widely on social media, following someone posed a query for females: which would you prefer be lost in the woods alongside a male or with a bear? Like all the best hypothetical scenarios, it revealed wildly different worldviews and life encounters, illuminated divides among genders, and was likely to induce a deep personal dilemma for anyone pondering about it extensively. There was also the almost inevitable coda where some males came online to inform women how stupid they had been to select the bear and went on to describe the consequences they deserved for it. This at least enabled those females who were uncertain about their decision to make it with a new confidence.
Dramatising the Scenario
To Cook a Bear effectively dramatises this clever small premise. This six-episode drama is based from Scandinavian writer Mikael Niemi’s 2018 book of the same name (translated two years later for English readers). It follows the tribulations of a pastor (the lead actor) and his household when they arrive to begin a fresh religious post within Kengis, a remote settlement in northern Sweden, in 1852. In a place with few pleasures, not one of the inhabitants especially warm to his puritanical stance on alcohol and revelry, but it is his protection of the poor – especially the native Sami population, from among whom comes the preacher’s foster child Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in societal fairness and equal rights that sets him in direct opposition against the Kengis powers that be.
The Opposing Forces
Quickly collaborating opposing him include the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the fearsome mill owner Madam Sjödahl (Pernilla August), observed early on dismissing a recently mangled laborer with minimal compensation as he remains babbling at the sight his crushed hand, and anyone else who benefit from a populace easily swayed with some containers of the whisky provided by the unsettling store owner the merchant Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). Although, to be fair, Lindmark’s eeriness diminishes once itinerant painter Beronius arrives on the scene (the performer, providing an acting turn of exceptional unsettling intensity). If they are – like the pastor himself – just slightly beyond being stereotypes, they are at least effective ones.
Plot Progression
Once the foundations of tension planted, it is time to proceed with the storyline. The servant employed by the doctor, Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), duly vanishes from the woods. Signs of her flight and animal scratches on a tree get discovered but she is nowhere to be seen. Gossip and anxieties of a man/maid-eating beast roaming the woodland spread, but the pastor holds a different view that he and Jussi set out to prove.
A Strange Creation
This Bear Drama is a somewhat peculiar show. It conjures a fine sense of the desolation that allows suspicion and bias and dark myths thrive from the native legend that animals can be controlled or inhabited by the souls of men. And it doesn’t idealising the hardscrabble life experienced by the residents, where brutality, be it from the wild or mankind, lurks constantly at the periphery, poised to explode. Yet the personas seldom evolve more than ciphers – or maybe, while the conflicts amid fairness and vengeance, rationality and faith, virtue and wickedness escalate, emblematic figures in a fable – preventing the entire production fully becoming immersive.
Stylistic Shifts
And then, exist numerous stylistically clashing moments in which the clergyman’s skill in finding evidence and determine the maid’s destiny turns nearly laughable. He positions himself looking at broken milk pots and strands of fur within storage sheds like a combined Hercule Poirot and Sherlock Holmes – with Jussi a particularly unfortunate assistant figure (neither of whom had to lick a mixture of blood spatter and the boss’s spit to agree that indeed, it was definitely coagulated blood at the crime scene), before announcing his newest conclusion and extracting a body out of a swamp.
Opposing Goals
The village elite are bent on proving that Hilda was killed by an animal, maybe to preserve the calm, or possibly to shield a fellow elite. The pastor is bent on proving the opposite, and the evidence so quickly stacks up in his favour that once more the drama’s plausibility and audience tolerance are tested. At its best, the series is reminiscent of the TV version a few years ago of Sarah Perry’s the serpent tale, through its portrayal of the competing allures and fears presented by rational thought and belief. At its worst, it’s more like Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Nevertheless, it does seem to provide the answer to the earlier query: “Females, choose the animal.”
The series streams on Disney+ currently.
