An intense debate recently spread widely across online platforms, following someone asked a query for females: which would you prefer be lost in the woods with a man or a bear? Like all the best hypothetical scenarios, it exposed wildly different perspectives and experiences, illuminated divides between the sexes, and could easily to induce an existential crisis if you thought on it for too long. There was also the almost inevitable follow-up in which some males came online to inform women how foolish they were for choosing the bear and went on to describe the punishments they merited for that choice. This at minimum allowed the women who had been hesitating over their choice to make it with renewed assurance.
Portraying the Setup
To Cook a Bear skillfully dramatises this nifty small premise. This six-episode drama is adapted on Scandinavian writer Mikael Niemi’s 2018 novel of the same name (translated two years later for English readers). It follows the tribulations of a pastor (the lead actor) and his household when they arrive to begin a new ministry within Kengis, a remote settlement in Sweden’s north, in 1852. In a place lacking many joys, not one of the inhabitants particularly appreciate his strict approach to drinking and revelry, yet it is his protection of the poor – particularly the native Sami population, from among whom hails the preacher’s foster child Jussi (the young actor) – and his belief in social justice and equality that sets him in direct opposition with the Kengis powers that be.
The Antagonists
Quickly in cahoots opposing him include the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the intimidating factory proprietor Madam Sjödahl (Pernilla August), observed early on dismissing a newly injured laborer with minimal compensation as he remains gibbering at the sight his crushed hand, and anyone else who profit from a community easily swayed with some containers of the whisky provided by the unsettling store owner Lindmark (the actor). However, in fairness, Lindmark’s creepiness diminishes when itinerant painter the artist Beronius appears on the scene (Simon J Berger, delivering an acting turn of rare discomfiting power). While they remain – like the pastor himself – only a little more being stereotypes, they are at least potent archetypes.
Narrative Development
With the seeds of tension sown, the moment arrives to get down to narrative business. The servant from the doctor’s house, Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), duly goes missing from the woods. Signs of her flight and animal scratches upon a trunk get discovered but she is nowhere to be seen. Gossip and fears regarding a human-devouring beast roaming the woods circulate, yet the clergyman holds a different view which he and his ward set out to verify.
A Strange Creation
This Bear Drama is a somewhat peculiar show. It creates a strong impression of the desolation that allows distrust and bias and grim legends flourish from the native legend that bears can be controlled or inhabited by the spirits of men. It avoids romanticise the hardscrabble life led by the villagers, where brutality, be it from nature or people, always looms at the periphery, poised to explode. But the characters rarely become more than ciphers – or perhaps, while the conflicts between justice and revenge, logic and religion, good and wickedness escalate, representative characters in a fable – which stops the whole thing fully becoming immersive.
Tonal Inconsistencies
Additionally, there are the many stylistically clashing instances where the pastor’s ability to discover clues and determine the maid’s destiny turns almost risible. He positions himself looking at broken milk pots and strands of fur in hay barns like a combined Hercule Poirot the English sleuth – alongside Jussi a particularly unfortunate Hastings-cum-Watson (neither of whom were required to taste a blend of blood spatter and the boss’s spit to agree that indeed, it was clearly coagulated blood on the site), before announcing his newest conclusion and pulling a corpse out of a swamp.
Clashing Agendas
The village elite are bent on proving that the maid was killed by a bear, perhaps to preserve the calm, perhaps to shield one of their own. The clergyman is bent on establishing the opposite, and the evidence so quickly accumulates supporting his view that once more the show’s credibility and audience tolerance get strained. At its best, To Cook a Bear evokes memories of the adaptation some years back of Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, through its portrayal of the competing attractions and fears presented by science and religion. At its worst, it’s more like Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Still, it appears to provide the answer to the earlier query: “Ladies, take the bear.”
To Cook a Bear is on Disney+ currently.
