An intense discussion lately spread widely on social media, after someone asked a query to women: which would you prefer find yourself stranded in a forest alongside a male or with a bear? Like all the most engaging thought experiments, it revealed vastly opposing worldviews and life encounters, illuminated divides among genders, and was likely to induce an existential crisis for anyone pondering on it extensively. There was also the predictable coda in which men of a certain stripe took to the internet to tell women how foolish they had been for choosing the animal and proceeded to limn the punishments they merited for it. This at least enabled those females who were uncertain about their decision to decide with a new confidence.
Dramatising the Setup
To Cook a Bear skillfully brings to life this nifty small premise. This six-episode drama is based on Scandinavian writer Mikael Niemi’s 2018 novel with the identical title (rendered two years later for an English audience). It traces the struggles of a pastor (the lead actor) and his family as they come to begin a fresh religious post in Kengis, a remote settlement in northern Sweden, during the mid-19th century. In a place lacking many joys, not one of the inhabitants especially appreciate his puritanical approach to alcohol and revelry, yet it is his defense of impoverished people – especially the native Sami population, from among whom hails the pastor’s foster child the youth Jussi (the young actor) – and his belief in social justice and equality that sets him on a collision course against the Kengis powers that be.
The Antagonists
Soon collaborating opposing him are the sheriff the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the intimidating mill owner Madam Sjödahl (the actress), seen initially dismissing a newly injured worker with a month’s pay as he remains babbling upon seeing his crushed hand, and anyone else who benefit from a populace easily swayed for a few bottles of the whisky provided by the unsettling shopkeeper Lindmark (the actor). Although, in fairness, Lindmark’s creepiness diminishes once itinerant painter the artist Beronius arrives on the scene (Simon J Berger, delivering an acting turn of rare unsettling intensity). While they remain – like the pastor himself – just slightly beyond than caricatures, they still serve as effective ones.
Plot Progression
Once the foundations of tension sown, the moment arrives to proceed to narrative business. The maid from the doctor’s house, Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), accordingly vanishes from the woods. Indications of her escape and bear markings on a tree get discovered yet she remains completely absent. Rumours and fears regarding a human-devouring beast roaming the woods circulate, yet the clergyman holds a different view which he and his ward set out to prove.
An Odd Beast
This Bear Drama is a slightly peculiar show. It conjures a fine sense of the bleakness that lets distrust and prejudice and dark myths thrive from the native legend that bears might be dominated or inhabited by the spirits of men. It avoids idealising the tough existence experienced by the villagers, in which brutality, be it from nature or mankind, always looms at the periphery, poised to explode. Yet the personas rarely become beyond symbols – or perhaps, as the struggles between justice and revenge, logic and faith, virtue and wickedness intensify, representative characters in a fable – preventing the whole thing fully becoming immersive.
Tonal Inconsistencies
And then, exist the many tonally jarring moments in which the clergyman’s skill in finding evidence and determine Hilda’s fate becomes nearly laughable. He positions himself observing shattered containers and clumps of hair within storage sheds like a combined Hercule Poirot the English sleuth – alongside Jussi a particularly unfortunate Hastings-cum-Watson (neither of whom were required to taste a mixture of blood spatter and the boss’s spit to agree that indeed, it was definitely dried blood on the site), prior to declaring his latest deduction and pulling a body out of a swamp.
Opposing Goals
The village elite are determined proving that the maid met her end by an animal, maybe to preserve the calm, perhaps to shield one of their own. The clergyman is bent on establishing otherwise, and the evidence so quickly stacks up in his favour that once more the show’s credibility and audience tolerance get strained. At its best, the series evokes memories of the TV version a few years ago of Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, through its portrayal of the competing attractions and terrors offered by rational thought and religion. In its low points, it resembles a bear-themed police procedural. Nevertheless, it appears to provide the response to that debated question: “Ladies, take the bear.”
To Cook a Bear streams on Disney+ now.
