A intense debate recently went viral across online platforms, following someone posed a query to women: would you rather be lost in the woods with a man or with a bear? Like all the best hypothetical scenarios, it revealed wildly different worldviews and life encounters, illuminated chasms among genders, and could easily cause a deep personal dilemma if you thought on it extensively. There was also the almost inevitable follow-up where men of a certain stripe came online to inform females how stupid they had been for choosing the animal and went on to limn the consequences they deserved for it. This at minimum enabled those females who had been hesitating over their choice to make it with a new confidence.
Dramatising the Setup
To Cook a Bear effectively brings to life this nifty little setup. This six-episode series is adapted from Scandinavian writer Mikael Niemi’s 2018 book with the identical title (translated in 2020 for English readers). It follows the struggles of a clergyman (the lead actor) and his family when they arrive to start a new ministry within Kengis, an isolated settlement in northern Sweden, during the mid-19th century. Within a community lacking many joys, not one of the inhabitants particularly appreciate his strict stance on drinking and revelry, but it is his protection of impoverished people – particularly the native Sami population, from which hails the preacher’s foster child Jussi (the young actor) – and his conviction in social justice and equality that places him on a collision course with the Kengis powers that be.
The Antagonists
Soon collaborating against him are the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the fearsome mill owner Madam Sjödahl (Pernilla August), observed initially firing a recently mangled worker with minimal compensation while he is still gibbering upon seeing of his pulped hand, and all others who benefit from a community easily swayed with some containers of the whisky sold by the creepy store owner Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). However, in fairness, Lindmark’s creepiness diminishes when travelling artist the artist Beronius arrives in the story (Simon J Berger, providing an acting turn of rare unsettling intensity). While they remain – similar to the clergyman – only a little more being stereotypes, they are at least effective ones.
Narrative Development
Once the foundations of conflict sown, the moment arrives to get down to narrative business. The servant employed by the doctor, Hilda (the actress), accordingly goes missing in the forest. Indications of her escape and bear markings on a tree get discovered yet she remains nowhere to be seen. Rumours and anxieties of a man/maid-eating beast roaming the woods spread, yet the clergyman holds a different view which he and his ward embark to verify.
A Strange Creation
This Bear Drama is a somewhat odd beast. It conjures a fine sense of the bleakness that allows distrust and bias and dark myths flourish from the native legend that bears might be dominated or inhabited by the souls of men. It avoids idealising the hardscrabble life experienced by the residents, where violence, be it from the wild or people, always looms at the periphery, poised to explode. But the characters rarely become beyond symbols – or perhaps, while the conflicts between justice and revenge, rationality and religion, virtue and wickedness escalate, representative characters in a fable – preventing the whole thing fully becoming immersive.
Stylistic Shifts
And then, there are numerous tonally jarring instances where the clergyman’s skill to discover clues and discern the maid’s destiny turns nearly laughable. He positions himself observing shattered containers and clumps of hair in hay barns as a fusion of the Belgian detective the English sleuth – alongside Jussi a rather hapless assistant figure (none of whom had to lick a mixture of blood droplets and saliva from his superior to agree that, yes, it was clearly dried blood on the site), prior to declaring his latest deduction and pulling a corpse from a bog.
Clashing Agendas
The village elite are determined demonstrating that Hilda was killed by an animal, perhaps to protect the calm, or possibly to protect a fellow elite. The clergyman is intent on proving the opposite, and the proof 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 evokes memories of the TV version a few years ago of Sarah Perry’s the serpent tale, with its evocation of the opposing attractions and fears offered by rational thought and belief. In its low points, it resembles a bear-themed police procedural. Still, it does seem to provide the answer to that debated question: “Females, choose the animal.”
The series streams on Disney+ now.
