An intense debate recently spread widely across online platforms, following someone posed a query to women: which would you prefer find yourself stranded in the woods alongside a male or with a bear? Similar to the most engaging thought experiments, it exposed wildly different perspectives and life encounters, highlighted chasms among genders, and was likely to induce a deep personal dilemma if you thought on it for too long. There was also the almost inevitable coda where men of a certain stripe took to the internet to tell females how stupid they had been to select the bear and proceeded to describe the punishments they deserved for it. This at minimum allowed those females who had been hesitating over their choice to make it with a new confidence.
Dramatising the Scenario
To Cook a Bear effectively dramatises this nifty little setup. This six-episode drama is based from Scandinavian writer Mikael Niemi’s 2018 novel with the identical title (translated in 2020 for English readers). It follows the tribulations of a clergyman (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his family when they arrive to begin a new ministry within Kengis, a remote village in Sweden’s north, during the mid-19th century. Within a community lacking many joys, not one of the inhabitants particularly appreciate his puritanical approach to drinking and revelry, but it is his protection of the poor – particularly the indigenous Sami, from among whom comes the pastor’s adopted son the youth Jussi (the young actor) – and his belief in social justice and equality that sets him in direct opposition against the Kengis local authorities.
The Antagonists
Soon in cahoots opposing him include the lawman Brahe (the performer), the fearsome mill owner Madam Sjödahl (the actress), observed initially firing a newly injured worker with a month’s pay as he remains gibbering at the sight of his pulped hand, and anyone else who benefit from a populace easily swayed with some containers of the whisky sold by the creepy store owner Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). Although, to be fair, Lindmark’s creepiness pales once travelling artist the artist Beronius arrives in the story (the performer, delivering a performance of exceptional discomfiting power). If they are – similar to the clergyman – just slightly beyond than caricatures, they still serve as potent archetypes.
Narrative Development
With the seeds of tension planted, the moment arrives to proceed to narrative business. The maid from the doctor’s house, the character Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), duly goes missing from the woods. Indications of her flight and bear markings on a tree are found yet she remains nowhere to be seen. Rumours and anxieties regarding a human-devouring beast roaming the woods spread, yet the clergyman has another theory that he and Jussi embark to verify.
A Strange Creation
This Bear Drama is a slightly odd beast. It creates a strong impression of the bleakness that lets suspicion and bias and dark myths flourish from the native legend that bears might be dominated or possessed by the souls of humans. And it doesn’t idealising the tough existence experienced by the residents, in which violence, be it from nature or people, always looms on the edges, waiting to erupt. Yet the personas seldom evolve beyond symbols – or maybe, while the conflicts amid fairness and vengeance, rationality and religion, good and evil escalate, emblematic figures within a moral tale – which stops the whole thing fully coming to life.
Stylistic Shifts
And then, there are the many stylistically clashing moments where the pastor’s ability to discover clues and determine Hilda’s fate becomes almost risible. He stands observing shattered containers and strands of fur within storage sheds like a combined Hercule Poirot and Sherlock Holmes – with Jussi a rather hapless Hastings-cum-Watson (neither of whom had to lick a mixture of blood spatter and the boss’s spit to agree that, yes, it was clearly coagulated blood on the site), before announcing his latest deduction and extracting a corpse from a bog.
Opposing Goals
The village elite are determined demonstrating that the maid was killed by a bear, maybe to protect the peace, or possibly to protect a fellow elite. The pastor is intent on proving otherwise, and the proof so rapidly stacks up supporting his view that again the show’s credibility and audience tolerance get strained. In its finest moments, the series evokes memories of the adaptation some years back of Sarah Perry’s the serpent tale, with its evocation of the opposing allures and fears offered by rational thought and religion. In its low points, it resembles Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Still, it does seem to provide the answer to that debated question: “Ladies, take the bear.”
The series is on Disney+ currently.
