An intense discussion lately spread widely across online platforms, after someone posed a query to women: which would you prefer be lost in the woods with a man or a bear? Similar to the most engaging thought experiments, it exposed wildly different perspectives and life encounters, highlighted divides between the sexes, and could easily cause a deep personal dilemma if you thought about it extensively. There was also the almost inevitable coda in which men of a certain stripe took to the internet to inform females how stupid they had been to select the bear and went on to describe the consequences they merited for it. This at minimum allowed those females who were uncertain over their choice to make it with renewed assurance.
Dramatising the Setup
To Cook a Bear skillfully dramatises this nifty small premise. This six-episode series is adapted on Swedish author the novelist’s 2018 novel of the same name (rendered in 2020 for an English audience). It traces the struggles of a pastor (the lead actor) and his household as they come to start a new ministry in Kengis, a remote settlement in Sweden’s north, in 1852. In a place lacking many joys, none of the inhabitants particularly appreciate his puritanical approach to drinking and revelry, yet it is his defense of impoverished people – particularly the native Sami population, from which hails the preacher’s adopted son the youth Jussi (the young actor) – and his conviction in societal fairness and equality that sets him on a collision course with the Kengis powers that be.
The Opposing Forces
Soon in cahoots against him include the lawman the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the fearsome factory proprietor Madam Sjödahl (the actress), observed early on dismissing a newly injured laborer with a month’s pay as he remains babbling upon seeing his crushed hand, and all others who profit from a populace who can be bought for a few bottles of liquor sold by the unsettling shopkeeper the merchant Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). However, in fairness, Lindmark’s creepiness diminishes when itinerant painter the artist Beronius arrives in the story (the performer, providing a performance of exceptional discomfiting power). If they are – similar to the clergyman – just slightly beyond than caricatures, they still serve as potent archetypes.
Plot Progression
Once the foundations of tension planted, it is time to get down with the storyline. The servant from the doctor’s house, Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), duly goes missing in the forest. Indications of her flight and animal scratches on a tree get discovered yet she remains nowhere to be seen. Rumours and fears regarding a human-devouring bear prowling the woodland circulate, yet the clergyman has another theory that he and Jussi embark to prove.
A Strange Creation
This Bear Drama is a slightly peculiar show. It creates a fine sense of the desolation that lets suspicion and prejudice and grim legends flourish based on local folklore that bears can be controlled or inhabited by the spirits of humans. It avoids idealising the tough existence led by the residents, in which violence, whether that of the wild or mankind, always looms on the edges, waiting to erupt. But the characters seldom evolve more than ciphers – or perhaps, while the conflicts amid fairness and revenge, rationality and religion, virtue and evil escalate, representative characters within a moral tale – which stops the whole thing fully coming to life.
Tonal Inconsistencies
And then, there are numerous stylistically clashing moments where the pastor’s ability to discover clues and determine Hilda’s fate becomes nearly laughable. He positions himself looking at broken milk pots and strands of fur in hay barns as a fusion of Hercule Poirot the English sleuth – with Jussi a particularly unfortunate assistant figure (none of whom were required to taste a mixture of blood spatter and saliva from his superior to agree that indeed, it was clearly dried blood on the site), prior to declaring his newest conclusion and extracting a corpse out of a swamp.
Opposing Goals
The village elite are bent on proving that the maid was killed by a bear, perhaps to protect the peace, perhaps to shield a fellow elite. The clergyman is bent on proving otherwise, and the evidence so rapidly stacks up supporting his view that again the show’s credibility and the viewer’s patience get strained. In its finest moments, the series evokes memories of the adaptation a few years ago of Sarah Perry’s the serpent tale, with its evocation of the opposing attractions and terrors offered by science and belief. In its low points, it resembles Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Still, it appears to provide the answer to the earlier query: “Females, choose the animal.”
To Cook a Bear streams on Disney+ now.
