An intense discussion recently went viral 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? Like all the most engaging hypothetical scenarios, it revealed wildly different perspectives and experiences, highlighted divides between the sexes, and could easily cause an existential crisis for anyone pondering on it for too long. Additionally, there came the predictable follow-up where some males took to the internet to inform women how stupid they were for choosing the bear and proceeded to describe the punishments they deserved for that choice. This at minimum enabled those females who had been hesitating over their choice to decide with a new confidence.
Dramatising the Scenario
To Cook a Bear effectively dramatises this clever small premise. This six-episode series is adapted on Swedish author Mikael Niemi’s 2018 book with the identical title (rendered two years later for an English audience). It follows the struggles of a pastor (the lead actor) and his family when they arrive to start a new ministry within Kengis, a remote settlement in northern Sweden, in 1852. Within a community with few pleasures, not one of the locals especially warm to his puritanical approach to alcohol and dancing, but it is his protection of impoverished people – particularly the native Sami population, from which hails the pastor’s foster child the youth Jussi (the young actor) – and his conviction in social justice and equal rights that places him on a collision course with the Kengis local authorities.
The Antagonists
Soon in cahoots against him include the sheriff the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the fearsome mill owner the matron Sjödahl (Pernilla August), seen early on dismissing a recently mangled laborer with minimal compensation as he remains babbling upon seeing his crushed hand, and anyone else who profit from a community easily swayed for a few bottles of the whisky provided by the creepy store owner Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). However, in fairness, Lindmark’s eeriness pales once travelling artist the artist Beronius appears in the story (Simon J Berger, providing an acting turn of rare discomfiting power). If they are – like the pastor himself – just slightly beyond being stereotypes, they still serve as potent archetypes.
Plot Progression
With the seeds of tension sown, it is time to proceed to narrative business. The maid from the doctor’s house, the character Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), duly vanishes from the woods. Signs 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, but the pastor has another theory that he and Jussi set out to verify.
A Strange Creation
This Bear Drama is a somewhat peculiar show. It conjures a fine sense of the bleakness that lets suspicion and prejudice and grim legends flourish based on local folklore that animals might be dominated or possessed by the souls of humans. And it doesn’t romanticise the tough existence led by the residents, where brutality, whether that of nature or mankind, always looms on the edges, poised to explode. But the characters seldom evolve more than ciphers – or perhaps, as the struggles between justice and revenge, rationality and faith, virtue and evil intensify, representative characters in a fable – which stops the whole thing fully coming to life.
Tonal Inconsistencies
And then, exist numerous tonally jarring moments where the pastor’s ability in finding evidence and discern Hilda’s fate becomes almost risible. He positions himself looking at shattered containers and strands of fur within storage sheds as a fusion of Hercule Poirot the English sleuth – with Jussi a rather hapless Hastings-cum-Watson (neither of whom had to lick a mixture of blood droplets and the boss’s spit to confirm that, yes, it was definitely coagulated blood at the crime scene), before announcing his newest conclusion and pulling a body from a bog.
Opposing Goals
The village elite are determined proving that the maid was killed by an animal, perhaps to protect the peace, perhaps to protect a fellow elite. The clergyman is intent on proving otherwise, and the evidence so quickly accumulates in his favour that again the show’s credibility and audience tolerance get strained. At its best, the series evokes memories of the adaptation a few years ago of the author’s The Essex Serpent, through its portrayal of the opposing attractions and fears offered by rational thought and religion. In its low points, it’s more like Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Still, it appears to offer the response to the earlier query: “Ladies, take the bear.”
The series streams on Disney+ now.
