A intense discussion recently spread widely across online platforms, after a user posed the question for females: would you rather find yourself stranded in a forest with a man or a bear? Similar to the most engaging thought experiments, it exposed wildly different worldviews and experiences, highlighted divides between the sexes, and could easily cause a deep personal dilemma for anyone pondering on it for too long. Additionally, there came the predictable coda in which some males came online to tell females how foolish they were to select the bear and proceeded to describe the consequences they merited for it. This at minimum enabled those females who had been hesitating over their choice to make it with renewed assurance.
Dramatising the Setup
To Cook a Bear effectively dramatises this nifty little setup. This six-episode drama is adapted on Scandinavian writer Mikael Niemi’s 2018 novel with the identical title (translated in 2020 for an English audience). It follows the tribulations of a pastor (the lead actor) and his household as they come to start a fresh religious post within Kengis, an isolated village in Sweden’s north, during the mid-19th century. Within a community with few pleasures, none of the inhabitants particularly appreciate his puritanical approach to drinking and revelry, yet it is his defense of the poor – particularly the indigenous Sami, from which comes the pastor’s foster child the youth Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in societal fairness and equality that sets him on a collision course against the Kengis powers that be.
The Antagonists
Quickly collaborating against him are the lawman Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the intimidating mill owner Madam Sjödahl (Pernilla August), observed initially dismissing a recently mangled worker with a month’s pay as he remains babbling upon seeing his crushed hand, and anyone else who benefit from a community who can be bought with some containers of liquor provided by the creepy store owner the merchant Lindmark (the actor). Although, to be fair, Lindmark’s creepiness pales once travelling artist the artist Beronius appears in the story (the performer, providing an acting turn of exceptional discomfiting power). While they remain – like the pastor himself – just slightly beyond being stereotypes, they still serve as potent archetypes.
Narrative Development
With the seeds of tension planted, it is time to get down with the storyline. The servant employed by the doctor, the character Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), accordingly vanishes in the forest. Signs of her flight and animal scratches on a tree are found but she is nowhere to be seen. Gossip and fears of a man/maid-eating beast 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 somewhat peculiar show. It creates a fine sense of the desolation that allows distrust and bias and grim legends flourish from the native legend that bears can be controlled or possessed by the spirits of humans. It avoids romanticise the tough existence led by the villagers, where brutality, be it from nature or people, always looms at the periphery, poised to explode. Yet the personas rarely become beyond symbols – or perhaps, as the struggles between justice and revenge, rationality and faith, good and wickedness escalate, representative characters in a fable – preventing the entire production truly coming to life.
Stylistic Shifts
And then, exist numerous stylistically clashing moments where the pastor’s ability in finding evidence and discern Hilda’s fate becomes almost risible. He positions himself observing shattered containers and strands of fur in hay barns like a combined the Belgian detective the English sleuth – with Jussi a rather hapless assistant figure (none of whom were required to taste a blend of blood droplets and the boss’s spit to agree that, yes, it was definitely dried blood at the crime scene), before announcing his latest deduction and pulling a body from a bog.
Opposing Goals
The village elite are bent on proving that the maid was killed by an animal, maybe to preserve the calm, perhaps to shield a fellow elite. The pastor is bent on establishing otherwise, and the proof so rapidly stacks up supporting his view that once more the drama’s plausibility and audience tolerance get strained. In its finest moments, the series evokes memories of the adaptation some years back of the author’s The Essex Serpent, through its portrayal of the competing allures and terrors offered by science and belief. At its worst, it’s more like Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Still, it appears to offer the answer to that debated question: “Females, choose the animal.”
The series streams on Disney+ now.
