An heated debate recently spread widely on social media, following a user asked a query to women: would you rather find yourself stranded in the woods with a man or with a bear? Like all the most engaging thought experiments, it exposed wildly different perspectives and life encounters, illuminated divides between the sexes, and could easily cause an existential crisis if you thought about it for too long. There was also the predictable follow-up in which men of a certain stripe took to the internet to inform women how stupid they had been for choosing the animal and proceeded to describe the punishments they merited for that choice. This at minimum allowed the women who were uncertain about their decision to make it with renewed assurance.
Portraying the Setup
To Cook a Bear skillfully dramatises this nifty little setup. This six-episode drama is based on Swedish author Mikael Niemi’s 2018 novel of the same name (rendered in 2020 for English readers). It traces the struggles of a pastor (the lead actor) and his household when they arrive to start a new ministry within Kengis, an isolated village in northern Sweden, during the mid-19th century. Within a community with few pleasures, not one of the inhabitants particularly appreciate his puritanical approach to drinking and dancing, yet it is his defense of the poor – especially the native Sami population, from which hails the pastor’s adopted son the youth Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in societal fairness and equality that sets him in direct opposition with the Kengis powers that be.
The Antagonists
Quickly in cahoots against him are the lawman Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the fearsome mill owner Madam Sjödahl (Pernilla August), seen early on firing a recently mangled worker with a month’s pay as he remains gibbering upon seeing of his pulped hand, and all others who profit from a populace easily swayed with some containers of liquor sold by the unsettling shopkeeper Lindmark (the actor). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s eeriness pales when itinerant painter Beronius appears in the story (Simon J Berger, providing an acting turn of exceptional unsettling intensity). While they remain – like the pastor himself – just slightly beyond than caricatures, they still serve as potent archetypes.
Narrative Development
With the seeds of tension sown, the moment arrives to proceed to narrative business. The maid employed by the doctor, 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. Gossip and anxieties of a man/maid-eating beast prowling the woods spread, but the pastor has another theory which he and his ward set out to verify.
An Odd Beast
To Cook a Bear is a somewhat odd beast. It creates a strong impression of the desolation that lets distrust and bias and grim legends thrive from the native legend that bears can be controlled or possessed by the spirits of men. It avoids idealising the hardscrabble life experienced by the residents, where violence, whether that of nature or people, always looms at the periphery, poised to explode. Yet the personas seldom evolve more than ciphers – or perhaps, while the conflicts between justice and revenge, rationality and religion, good and evil escalate, emblematic figures in a fable – preventing the whole thing fully coming to life.
Stylistic Shifts
And then, exist the many tonally jarring moments where the pastor’s ability in finding evidence and discern Hilda’s fate becomes nearly laughable. He stands observing broken milk pots and strands of fur in hay barns as a fusion of the Belgian detective and Sherlock Holmes – alongside Jussi a rather hapless assistant figure (neither of whom had to lick a blend of blood spatter and the boss’s spit to agree that, yes, it was definitely coagulated blood on the site), prior to declaring his newest conclusion and extracting a corpse from a bog.
Opposing Goals
The village elite are determined proving that the maid met her end by an animal, maybe to protect the calm, perhaps to protect a fellow elite. The clergyman is intent on proving the opposite, and the evidence so quickly stacks up supporting his view that once more the drama’s plausibility and audience tolerance are tested. At its best, the series is reminiscent of the adaptation a few years ago of Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, through its portrayal of the competing allures and terrors offered by science and religion. At its worst, it resembles a bear-themed police procedural. Still, it appears to offer the answer to that debated question: “Ladies, take the bear.”
To Cook a Bear is on Disney+ currently.
