An heated debate lately spread widely across online platforms, following someone posed the question for females: would you rather be lost in the woods with a man or with a bear? Similar to the most engaging thought experiments, it revealed wildly different perspectives and experiences, highlighted divides among genders, and could easily to induce a deep personal dilemma if you thought about it extensively. There was also the predictable follow-up where men of a certain stripe came online to inform females how foolish they had been to select the bear and proceeded to limn the consequences they merited for that choice. This at least enabled those females who had been hesitating over their choice to decide with a new confidence.
Dramatising the Scenario
To Cook a Bear effectively dramatises this clever little setup. This six-episode series is adapted on Scandinavian writer Mikael Niemi’s 2018 novel of the same name (rendered in 2020 for an English audience). It traces the struggles of a clergyman (the lead actor) and his family when they arrive to begin a fresh religious post in Kengis, a remote village in northern Sweden, during the mid-19th century. In a place with few pleasures, none of the locals especially appreciate his puritanical stance on alcohol and dancing, yet it is his protection of the poor – especially the native Sami population, from which hails the preacher’s adopted son Jussi (the young actor) – and his conviction in societal fairness and equality that sets him in direct opposition with the Kengis local authorities.
The Antagonists
Soon collaborating against him are the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the fearsome factory proprietor the matron Sjödahl (Pernilla August), observed initially dismissing a recently mangled worker with a month’s pay while he is still babbling upon seeing his crushed hand, and all others who benefit from a populace easily swayed for a few bottles of the whisky sold by the creepy store owner the merchant Lindmark (the actor). Although, to be fair, Lindmark’s eeriness diminishes when itinerant painter Beronius arrives on the scene (the performer, delivering an acting turn of rare discomfiting power). If they are – similar to the clergyman – just slightly beyond than caricatures, they are at least effective ones.
Narrative Development
With the seeds of conflict sown, the moment arrives to proceed to narrative business. The maid employed by the doctor, the character Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), accordingly goes missing from the woods. Signs of her escape and bear markings upon a trunk are found but she is nowhere to be seen. Rumours and anxieties of a man/maid-eating beast prowling the woods circulate, yet the clergyman holds a different view which he and his ward embark to verify.
A Strange Creation
To Cook a Bear is a somewhat peculiar show. It conjures 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 possessed by the souls of humans. And it doesn’t romanticise the hardscrabble life experienced by the residents, in which violence, whether that of nature or mankind, lurks constantly on the edges, poised to explode. Yet the personas rarely become beyond symbols – or perhaps, while the conflicts between justice and vengeance, logic and faith, virtue and wickedness escalate, emblematic figures within a moral tale – which stops the whole thing truly coming to life.
Stylistic Shifts
And then, exist numerous stylistically clashing moments where the pastor’s ability to discover clues and discern the maid’s destiny turns nearly laughable. He positions himself observing shattered containers and strands of fur within storage sheds like a combined the Belgian detective and Sherlock Holmes – alongside Jussi a rather hapless Hastings-cum-Watson (neither of whom were required to lick a mixture of blood droplets and the boss’s spit to agree that, yes, it was clearly coagulated blood on the site), prior to declaring his latest deduction and pulling a corpse from a bog.
Clashing Agendas
The local leaders are determined proving that the maid met her end by an animal, maybe to preserve the peace, perhaps to shield one of their own. The pastor is intent on establishing otherwise, and the evidence so quickly stacks up in his favour that once more the drama’s plausibility and the viewer’s patience get strained. In its finest moments, the series is reminiscent of the TV version a few years ago of Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, through its portrayal of the opposing attractions and fears offered by rational thought and belief. At its worst, it’s more like a bear-themed police procedural. Nevertheless, it does seem to offer the answer to the earlier query: “Females, choose the animal.”
The series is on Disney+ currently.
