A heated discussion lately went viral across online platforms, after someone posed the question to women: would you rather be lost in a forest alongside a male or with a bear? Similar to the best hypothetical scenarios, it revealed vastly opposing worldviews and life encounters, illuminated chasms between the sexes, and was likely cause a deep personal dilemma if you thought about it for too long. Additionally, there came the almost inevitable coda in which some males took to the internet to inform females how foolish they had been to select the bear and proceeded to limn the punishments they merited for it. This at minimum enabled the women who were uncertain over their choice to make it with renewed assurance.
Dramatising the Scenario
To Cook a Bear effectively brings to life this nifty small premise. This six-episode series is based from Scandinavian writer Mikael Niemi’s 2018 novel with the identical title (translated two years later for English readers). It follows the struggles of a clergyman (the lead actor) and his household as they come to begin a fresh religious post within Kengis, an isolated village in northern Sweden, during the mid-19th century. Within a community lacking many joys, none of the locals particularly appreciate his puritanical stance on drinking and dancing, but it is his defense of impoverished people – particularly the native Sami population, from among whom hails the preacher’s foster child the youth Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his conviction in societal fairness and equality that sets him on a collision course with the Kengis local authorities.
The Antagonists
Soon collaborating against him include the lawman Brahe (the performer), the fearsome factory proprietor Madam Sjödahl (Pernilla August), seen early on firing a newly injured laborer with a month’s pay while he is still babbling at the sight of his pulped hand, and anyone else who benefit from a populace who can be bought for a few bottles of liquor provided by the unsettling store owner the merchant Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). However, in fairness, Lindmark’s eeriness diminishes once itinerant painter Beronius arrives in the story (the performer, delivering an acting turn of exceptional unsettling intensity). If they are – like the pastor himself – just slightly beyond being stereotypes, they still serve as potent archetypes.
Plot Progression
With the seeds of tension sown, the moment arrives to get down with the storyline. The maid from the doctor’s house, Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), duly goes missing from the woods. Indications of her flight and bear markings on a tree are found but she is completely absent. Rumours and fears regarding a human-devouring beast prowling the woodland circulate, but the pastor holds a different view that he and Jussi set out to verify.
A Strange Creation
This Bear Drama is a slightly peculiar show. It conjures a fine sense of the bleakness that lets distrust and prejudice and grim legends thrive from the native legend that bears can be controlled or inhabited by the spirits of humans. It avoids idealising the tough existence experienced by the villagers, where violence, whether that of the wild or people, lurks constantly on the edges, waiting to erupt. Yet the personas seldom evolve beyond symbols – or maybe, as the struggles between justice and revenge, rationality and religion, virtue and evil intensify, representative characters within a moral tale – preventing the whole thing truly coming to life.
Tonal Inconsistencies
And then, there are numerous stylistically clashing instances in which the clergyman’s skill in finding evidence and discern the maid’s destiny turns almost risible. He positions himself looking at shattered containers and strands of fur within storage sheds as a fusion of Hercule Poirot and Sherlock Holmes – with Jussi a particularly unfortunate Hastings-cum-Watson (none of whom had to taste a blend of blood droplets and the boss’s spit to agree that, yes, it was clearly dried blood at the crime scene), before announcing his newest conclusion and extracting a corpse out of a swamp.
Opposing Goals
The village elite are determined proving that the maid was killed by a bear, maybe to preserve the calm, perhaps to shield one of their own. The pastor is intent on establishing the opposite, and the proof so rapidly stacks up in his favour that again the show’s credibility 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 Essex Serpent, through its portrayal of the competing attractions and terrors offered by rational thought and belief. In its low points, it resembles a bear-themed police procedural. Still, it appears to offer the answer to the earlier query: “Females, choose the animal.”
To Cook a Bear streams on Disney+ now.
