A heated discussion recently 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 with a bear? Similar to the best hypothetical scenarios, it revealed vastly opposing perspectives and life encounters, illuminated chasms among genders, and was likely to induce an existential crisis if you thought on it extensively. There was also the almost inevitable coda where men of a certain stripe took to the internet to inform females how foolish they had been for choosing the animal and proceeded to limn the punishments they merited for that choice. This at least allowed the women who were uncertain about their decision to decide with a new confidence.
Dramatising the Setup
To Cook a Bear effectively brings to life this nifty little setup. The six-part series is adapted on Scandinavian writer Mikael Niemi’s 2018 novel of the same name (translated two years later for an English audience). It traces the tribulations of a clergyman (the lead actor) and his household when they arrive to begin a fresh religious post in Kengis, a remote village in Sweden’s north, during the mid-19th century. Within a community with few pleasures, not one of the inhabitants especially appreciate his strict approach to drinking and revelry, but it is his protection of impoverished people – particularly the indigenous Sami, from among whom hails the pastor’s foster child Jussi (the young actor) – and his belief in social justice and equal rights that sets him in direct opposition with the Kengis local authorities.
The Opposing Forces
Quickly in cahoots opposing him include the lawman Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the intimidating mill owner Madam Sjödahl (the actress), observed early on firing a recently mangled worker with minimal compensation as he remains gibbering 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 store owner Lindmark (the actor). However, in fairness, Lindmark’s creepiness diminishes when itinerant painter the artist Beronius appears in the story (Simon J Berger, providing an acting turn of exceptional discomfiting power). While they remain – similar to the clergyman – only a little more being stereotypes, they still serve as potent archetypes.
Plot Progression
With the seeds of tension sown, the moment arrives to get down with the storyline. The servant employed by the doctor, the character Hilda (the actress), duly goes missing from the woods. Signs of her escape and bear markings upon a trunk get discovered yet she remains completely absent. Rumours and anxieties of a man/maid-eating bear roaming the woods circulate, but the pastor has another theory that he and Jussi set out to prove.
An Odd Beast
This Bear Drama is a slightly peculiar show. It conjures a fine sense of the desolation that lets distrust and prejudice and dark myths flourish from the native legend that bears might be dominated or possessed by the spirits of humans. And it doesn’t romanticise the tough existence experienced by the villagers, where brutality, whether that of nature or mankind, always looms at the periphery, waiting to erupt. Yet the personas seldom evolve more than ciphers – or perhaps, as the struggles amid fairness and vengeance, rationality and faith, virtue and wickedness intensify, representative characters within a moral tale – preventing the entire production fully becoming immersive.
Tonal Inconsistencies
And then, there are the many tonally jarring moments in which the pastor’s ability in finding evidence and determine Hilda’s fate turns nearly laughable. He stands looking at broken milk pots and clumps of hair within storage sheds like a combined the Belgian detective the English sleuth – alongside Jussi a particularly unfortunate assistant figure (none of whom were required to lick a mixture of blood spatter and the boss’s spit to agree that, yes, it was definitely coagulated blood on the site), prior to declaring his latest deduction and pulling a body out of a swamp.
Opposing Goals
The local leaders are determined demonstrating that Hilda was killed by a bear, perhaps to preserve the calm, perhaps to shield a fellow elite. The clergyman is bent on proving otherwise, and the proof so quickly accumulates supporting his view that once more the show’s credibility and audience tolerance get strained. In its finest moments, the series evokes memories of the adaptation some years back of the author’s the serpent tale, with its evocation of the competing allures and terrors offered by science and religion. In its low points, it’s more like Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Nevertheless, it does seem to offer the response to the earlier query: “Females, choose the animal.”
To Cook a Bear streams on Disney+ now.
