A heated discussion lately went viral across online platforms, after a user posed a query for females: would you rather be lost in the woods alongside a male or with a bear? Like all the most engaging hypothetical scenarios, it revealed vastly opposing worldviews and life encounters, highlighted chasms among genders, and could easily cause an existential crisis if you thought about it extensively. Additionally, there came the predictable coda where men of a certain stripe came online to inform women how stupid they had been to select the bear and went on to describe the punishments they deserved for that choice. This at least allowed those females who had been hesitating about their decision to make it with a new confidence.
Portraying the Scenario
To Cook a Bear skillfully brings to life this clever little setup. This six-episode drama is based from Scandinavian writer the novelist’s 2018 book of the same name (translated in 2020 for an English audience). It follows the struggles of a clergyman (the lead actor) and his family as they come to start a new ministry within Kengis, a remote village in northern Sweden, during the mid-19th century. In a place with few pleasures, none of the locals particularly appreciate his puritanical 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 conviction in societal fairness and equal rights that places him in direct opposition against the Kengis local authorities.
The Opposing Forces
Soon in cahoots opposing him include the lawman the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the fearsome mill owner Madam Sjödahl (the actress), seen early on firing a newly injured worker with minimal compensation as he remains babbling at the sight his crushed hand, and anyone else who profit from a populace easily swayed with some containers of the whisky sold by the creepy store owner Lindmark (the actor). However, in fairness, Lindmark’s eeriness diminishes once travelling artist the artist Beronius arrives in the story (the performer, providing a performance of exceptional unsettling intensity). While they remain – like the pastor himself – only a little more being stereotypes, they are at least effective ones.
Narrative Development
With the seeds of tension planted, the moment arrives to get down to narrative business. The maid from the doctor’s house, Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), duly vanishes from the woods. Signs of her escape and animal scratches on a tree get discovered but she is nowhere to be seen. Rumours and anxieties of a man/maid-eating beast prowling the woodland circulate, yet the clergyman has another theory that he and Jussi set out to verify.
An Odd Beast
This Bear Drama is a somewhat odd beast. It conjures a fine sense of the desolation that lets suspicion and bias and grim legends thrive based on local folklore that bears might be dominated or possessed by the souls of humans. It avoids idealising the hardscrabble life led by the residents, in which violence, whether that of nature or mankind, lurks constantly at the periphery, poised to explode. But the characters seldom evolve more than ciphers – or maybe, as the struggles amid fairness and vengeance, logic and religion, virtue and evil escalate, emblematic figures within a moral tale – which stops the whole thing truly becoming immersive.
Stylistic Shifts
Additionally, there are the many stylistically clashing instances in which the pastor’s ability in finding evidence and discern the maid’s destiny becomes nearly laughable. He positions himself observing broken milk pots and clumps of hair in hay barns as a fusion of Hercule Poirot and Sherlock Holmes – alongside Jussi a rather hapless assistant figure (neither of whom were required to taste a mixture of blood spatter and the boss’s spit to confirm that indeed, it was clearly dried blood on the site), prior to declaring his newest conclusion and extracting a body out of a swamp.
Opposing Goals
The village elite are determined demonstrating that Hilda met her end by an animal, maybe to preserve the calm, perhaps to protect a fellow elite. The clergyman is bent on proving otherwise, and the evidence so rapidly stacks up supporting his view that again the drama’s plausibility and audience tolerance get strained. In its finest moments, the series evokes memories of the TV version a few years ago of the author’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the opposing attractions and terrors offered by science and belief. In its low points, it resembles Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Nevertheless, it does seem to provide the answer to that debated question: “Ladies, take the bear.”
The series streams on Disney+ now.
