A intense debate recently spread widely across online platforms, after a user asked the question to women: would you rather be lost in a forest alongside a male or with a bear? Similar to the best thought experiments, it revealed wildly different perspectives and experiences, highlighted chasms among genders, and was likely to induce an existential crisis for anyone pondering on it for too long. There was also the almost inevitable coda where men of a certain stripe came online to tell females how stupid they had been for choosing the bear and proceeded to limn the punishments they merited for it. This at least enabled those females who had been hesitating over their choice to make it with a new confidence.
Portraying the Scenario
To Cook a Bear skillfully dramatises this clever little setup. The six-part series is based on Scandinavian writer Mikael Niemi’s 2018 book of the same name (rendered two years later for English readers). It follows the struggles of a pastor (the lead actor) and his household as they come to begin a fresh religious post within Kengis, a remote village in Sweden’s north, in 1852. Within a community with few pleasures, none of the inhabitants particularly warm to his puritanical stance on alcohol and dancing, but it is his defense of impoverished people – especially the indigenous Sami, from which comes the pastor’s adopted son the youth Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in societal fairness and equality that places him on a collision course against the Kengis local authorities.
The Antagonists
Soon in cahoots against him include the sheriff the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the fearsome factory proprietor Madam Sjödahl (the actress), seen early on firing a newly injured worker with a month’s pay as he remains gibbering at the sight of his pulped hand, and anyone else who profit from a populace who can be bought with some containers of liquor sold by the unsettling store owner the merchant Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). Although, in fairness, Lindmark’s creepiness pales when itinerant painter the artist Beronius appears in the story (Simon J Berger, delivering an acting turn of rare discomfiting power). If they are – like the pastor himself – just slightly beyond than caricatures, they are at least effective ones.
Plot Progression
Once the foundations of conflict sown, the moment arrives to proceed with the storyline. The maid from the doctor’s house, the character Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), duly vanishes in the forest. Indications of her flight and animal scratches upon a trunk get discovered but she is completely absent. Gossip and fears regarding a human-devouring bear prowling the woodland spread, yet the clergyman holds a different view that he and Jussi embark to prove.
An Odd Beast
This Bear Drama is a somewhat odd beast. It creates a strong impression of the desolation that allows suspicion and bias and grim legends flourish from the native legend that bears can be controlled or possessed by the spirits of men. And it doesn’t idealising the hardscrabble life experienced by the villagers, where brutality, be it from nature or mankind, always looms on the edges, poised to explode. Yet the personas seldom evolve beyond symbols – or perhaps, as the struggles between justice and revenge, logic and religion, virtue and wickedness escalate, emblematic figures within a moral tale – which stops the entire production truly coming to life.
Stylistic Shifts
And then, there are numerous stylistically clashing moments in which the clergyman’s skill to discover clues and determine the maid’s destiny becomes almost risible. He positions himself observing broken milk pots and clumps of hair within storage sheds like a combined the Belgian detective and Sherlock Holmes – with Jussi a rather hapless assistant figure (none of whom had to lick a blend of blood droplets and saliva from his superior to confirm that, yes, it was definitely coagulated blood at the crime scene), before announcing his newest conclusion and pulling a corpse from a bog.
Clashing Agendas
The local leaders are determined proving that Hilda was killed by an animal, perhaps to preserve the calm, or possibly to shield one of their own. The clergyman is intent on proving the opposite, and the evidence so rapidly stacks up supporting his view that once more the drama’s plausibility and the viewer’s patience are tested. In its finest moments, the series is reminiscent of the adaptation a few years ago of the author’s the serpent tale, with its evocation of the opposing attractions and terrors presented by rational thought and religion. In its low points, it’s more like a bear-themed police procedural. Nevertheless, it appears to provide the response to the earlier query: “Ladies, take the bear.”
The series is on Disney+ currently.
