An intense debate lately spread widely on social media, following someone posed the question to women: which would you prefer find yourself stranded in a forest with a man or a bear? Like all the most engaging hypothetical scenarios, it revealed vastly opposing perspectives and experiences, illuminated divides between the sexes, and could easily cause an existential crisis if you thought about it for too long. Additionally, there came the predictable follow-up where some males came online to tell women how stupid they were to select the bear and proceeded to describe the punishments they merited for that choice. This at minimum enabled those females who were uncertain about their decision to make it with a new confidence.
Portraying the Scenario
To Cook a Bear effectively dramatises this clever small premise. This six-episode drama is adapted from Scandinavian writer Mikael Niemi’s 2018 novel of the same name (translated two years later for an English audience). It follows the struggles of a clergyman (the lead actor) and his household as they come to begin a new ministry within Kengis, an isolated settlement in Sweden’s north, during the mid-19th century. Within a community with few pleasures, not one of the locals especially appreciate his strict stance on alcohol and dancing, yet it is his protection of impoverished people – especially the native Sami population, from among whom comes the pastor’s foster child the youth Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his conviction in societal fairness and equal rights that places him on a collision course against the Kengis local authorities.
The Antagonists
Soon collaborating against him include the lawman the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the intimidating mill owner Madam Sjödahl (the actress), observed early on firing a recently mangled worker with minimal compensation as he remains gibbering at the sight his crushed hand, and anyone else who benefit from a community who can be bought with some containers of liquor provided by the creepy shopkeeper the merchant Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). Although, in fairness, Lindmark’s creepiness diminishes once itinerant painter Beronius arrives in the story (the performer, providing a performance of rare unsettling intensity). If they are – like the pastor himself – only a little more than caricatures, they still serve as potent archetypes.
Plot Progression
With the seeds of tension sown, the moment arrives to get down to narrative business. The maid employed by the doctor, Hilda (the actress), duly vanishes from the woods. Signs of her flight and animal scratches upon a trunk are found yet she remains nowhere to be seen. Rumours and fears of a man/maid-eating bear prowling the woods circulate, but the pastor holds a different view that he and Jussi set out to verify.
An Odd Beast
This Bear Drama is a somewhat odd beast. It conjures a fine sense of the desolation that lets suspicion and prejudice and dark myths flourish based on local folklore that bears might be dominated or possessed by the souls of humans. It avoids idealising the hardscrabble life led by the residents, where brutality, be it from nature or people, lurks constantly on the edges, waiting to erupt. Yet the personas seldom evolve beyond symbols – or perhaps, as the struggles amid fairness and vengeance, rationality and religion, good and evil intensify, representative characters in a fable – which stops the entire production fully coming to life.
Tonal Inconsistencies
And then, exist the many stylistically clashing instances in which the pastor’s ability 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 – alongside Jussi a rather hapless assistant figure (neither of whom had to taste a mixture of blood spatter and saliva from his superior to agree that, yes, it was clearly dried blood on the site), before announcing his newest conclusion and pulling a body from a bog.
Clashing Agendas
The village elite are bent on demonstrating that the maid met her end by an animal, perhaps to preserve the calm, perhaps to shield one of their own. The clergyman is bent on establishing the opposite, and the evidence so rapidly stacks up in his favour that again the drama’s plausibility and audience tolerance get strained. In its finest moments, the series is reminiscent of the adaptation some years back of the author’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the opposing allures and fears presented by rational thought and belief. In its low points, it resembles a bear-themed police procedural. Still, it appears to offer the response to the earlier query: “Ladies, take the bear.”
To Cook a Bear streams on Disney+ currently.
