A heated discussion lately went viral on social media, following someone asked the question to women: would you rather find yourself stranded in a forest with a man or with a bear? Similar to the best thought experiments, it exposed wildly different worldviews and experiences, highlighted chasms between the sexes, and was likely cause a deep personal dilemma 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 females how stupid they had been for choosing the animal and proceeded to limn the consequences they deserved for it. 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 clever little setup. This six-episode drama is based from Scandinavian writer Mikael Niemi’s 2018 book with the identical title (translated in 2020 for an English audience). It traces the tribulations of a pastor (the lead actor) and his household when they arrive to begin a new ministry in Kengis, an isolated settlement in Sweden’s north, during the mid-19th century. Within a community lacking many joys, not one of the inhabitants especially appreciate his puritanical stance on drinking and revelry, yet it is his protection of impoverished people – particularly the native Sami population, from which comes the pastor’s adopted son the youth 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 collaborating against him are the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the fearsome mill owner Madam Sjödahl (the actress), seen early on dismissing a newly injured worker 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 provided by the unsettling store owner Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). Although, to be fair, Lindmark’s eeriness pales when itinerant painter the artist Beronius arrives in the story (Simon J Berger, providing a performance of rare discomfiting power). If they are – similar to the clergyman – only a little more than caricatures, they are at least effective ones.
Narrative Development
Once the foundations of tension planted, the moment arrives to get down to narrative business. The maid from the doctor’s house, Hilda (the actress), duly vanishes from the woods. Indications of her flight and animal scratches upon a trunk get discovered but she is nowhere to be seen. Gossip and anxieties regarding a human-devouring bear prowling the woods spread, but the pastor holds a different view that he and Jussi set out to verify.
A Strange Creation
This Bear Drama is a slightly odd beast. It creates a fine sense of the bleakness that lets suspicion and bias and dark myths thrive based on local folklore that bears can be controlled or possessed by the spirits of humans. It avoids romanticise the hardscrabble life led by the residents, in which brutality, whether that of nature or people, always looms on the edges, poised to explode. But the characters seldom evolve beyond symbols – or maybe, while the conflicts amid fairness and revenge, logic and religion, good and wickedness escalate, emblematic figures within a moral tale – preventing the whole thing fully becoming immersive.
Tonal Inconsistencies
Additionally, exist the many tonally jarring instances where the clergyman’s skill to discover clues and determine Hilda’s fate turns almost risible. He stands looking at shattered containers and clumps of hair in hay barns as a fusion of the Belgian detective and Sherlock Holmes – alongside Jussi a rather hapless Hastings-cum-Watson (none 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 at the crime scene), before announcing his newest conclusion and extracting a corpse from a bog.
Clashing Agendas
The village elite are bent on proving that Hilda was killed by a bear, perhaps to protect the calm, perhaps to shield one of their own. The pastor is bent on establishing the opposite, and the proof so quickly accumulates in his favour that once more the show’s credibility and the viewer’s patience are tested. In its finest moments, the series is reminiscent of the adaptation some years back of the author’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the opposing allures and fears offered by science and belief. In its low points, it’s more like Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Still, it appears to offer the response to that debated question: “Ladies, take the bear.”
The series is on Disney+ now.
