An intense debate recently spread widely across online platforms, following someone posed the question for females: would you rather be lost in a forest with a man or with a bear? Like all the best thought experiments, it revealed vastly opposing worldviews and life encounters, illuminated divides among genders, and could easily cause a deep personal dilemma for anyone pondering on it extensively. Additionally, there came the almost inevitable coda where some males came online to inform women how stupid they had been for choosing the animal and went on to describe the consequences they merited for it. This at minimum allowed the women who were uncertain about their decision to make it with a new confidence.
Portraying the Setup
To Cook a Bear skillfully dramatises this clever little setup. The six-part drama is adapted from Swedish author Mikael Niemi’s 2018 novel of the same name (translated two years later for an English audience). It follows the struggles of a pastor (the lead actor) and his household as they come to begin a new ministry within Kengis, an isolated village in northern Sweden, in 1852. Within a community lacking many joys, not one of the locals particularly warm to his strict approach to drinking and dancing, but it is his defense of impoverished people – especially the indigenous Sami, from among whom hails the pastor’s adopted son the youth Jussi (the young actor) – and his conviction in societal fairness and equality that sets him in direct opposition against the Kengis powers that be.
The Opposing Forces
Soon collaborating against him are the lawman the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the intimidating factory proprietor Madam Sjödahl (Pernilla August), seen early on firing a recently mangled laborer with a month’s pay while he is still babbling at the sight his crushed hand, and all others who profit from a community easily swayed with some containers of the whisky sold by the creepy store owner the merchant Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). Although, in fairness, Lindmark’s creepiness diminishes once itinerant painter Beronius arrives on the scene (the performer, providing an acting turn of rare unsettling intensity). If they are – similar to the clergyman – only a little more being stereotypes, they still serve as potent archetypes.
Narrative Development
Once the foundations of tension sown, the moment arrives to get down with the storyline. The maid from the doctor’s house, Hilda (the actress), duly goes missing in the forest. Indications of her flight and bear markings on a tree get discovered but she is completely absent. Rumours and anxieties regarding a human-devouring beast prowling the woods circulate, but the pastor holds a different view which he and his ward embark to prove.
A Strange Creation
This Bear Drama is a somewhat odd beast. It conjures a strong impression of the bleakness that lets distrust and bias and grim legends flourish from the native legend that animals can be controlled or inhabited by the spirits of men. And it doesn’t idealising the hardscrabble life led by the residents, in which brutality, be it from nature or mankind, always looms at the periphery, waiting to erupt. But the characters seldom evolve beyond symbols – or perhaps, as the struggles between justice and revenge, logic and religion, good and evil intensify, representative characters within a moral tale – which stops the whole thing truly coming to life.
Stylistic Shifts
And then, there are numerous stylistically clashing instances where the clergyman’s skill in finding evidence and discern Hilda’s fate becomes nearly laughable. He positions himself looking at shattered containers and strands of fur within storage sheds as a fusion of the Belgian detective the English sleuth – alongside Jussi a rather hapless Hastings-cum-Watson (none of whom had to lick a mixture of blood spatter and saliva from his superior to confirm that, yes, it was clearly dried blood at the crime scene), before announcing his newest conclusion and pulling a corpse out of a swamp.
Clashing Agendas
The village elite are determined demonstrating that the maid was killed by a bear, maybe to preserve the calm, perhaps to protect a fellow elite. The clergyman is bent on establishing otherwise, and the proof so rapidly stacks up in his favour that once more the show’s credibility and audience tolerance are tested. In its finest moments, the series evokes memories of the TV version some years back of the author’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the opposing allures and terrors presented by science and belief. In its low points, it resembles a bear-themed police procedural. Still, it does seem to provide the answer to the earlier query: “Ladies, take the bear.”
To Cook a Bear streams on Disney+ currently.
