An intense debate recently went viral on social media, following a user asked a query for females: which would you prefer be lost in the woods with a man or a bear? Like all the most engaging hypothetical scenarios, it revealed vastly opposing worldviews and experiences, illuminated chasms among genders, and could easily cause an existential crisis for anyone pondering about it extensively. There was also the predictable follow-up where some males took to the internet to tell women how stupid they had been for choosing the animal and went on to describe the punishments they merited for it. This at least enabled the women who were uncertain over their choice to make it with renewed assurance.
Dramatising the Setup
To Cook a Bear effectively dramatises this nifty little setup. The six-part drama is adapted from Scandinavian writer Mikael Niemi’s 2018 book of the same name (rendered two years later for English readers). It follows the tribulations of a clergyman (the lead actor) and his family when they arrive to begin a fresh religious post in Kengis, a remote settlement in Sweden’s north, during the mid-19th century. Within a community with few pleasures, none of the locals especially appreciate his puritanical stance on alcohol and dancing, but it is his protection of the poor – especially the indigenous Sami, from among whom comes the pastor’s adopted son Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his conviction in societal fairness and equality that places him on a collision course against the Kengis powers that be.
The Antagonists
Soon in cahoots against him include the lawman the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the intimidating mill owner the matron Sjödahl (Pernilla August), observed early on firing a recently mangled worker with a month’s pay as he remains babbling at the sight his crushed hand, and anyone else who benefit from a community easily swayed with some containers of liquor sold by the creepy shopkeeper Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s creepiness pales when itinerant painter the artist Beronius appears in the story (the performer, providing a performance of exceptional discomfiting power). While they remain – similar to the clergyman – only a little more being stereotypes, they are at least potent archetypes.
Plot Progression
Once the foundations of tension sown, it is time to get down to narrative business. The maid from the doctor’s house, the character Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), accordingly goes missing from the woods. Signs of her escape and animal scratches upon a trunk get discovered but she is nowhere to be seen. Gossip and anxieties regarding a human-devouring beast roaming the woodland spread, yet the clergyman has another theory that he and Jussi set out to prove.
An Odd Beast
To Cook a Bear is a somewhat peculiar show. It creates a fine sense of the bleakness that lets suspicion and bias and grim legends thrive based on local folklore that animals might be dominated or possessed by the souls of men. And it doesn’t idealising the hardscrabble life experienced by the villagers, where violence, whether that of nature or mankind, always looms on the edges, poised to explode. But the characters seldom evolve beyond symbols – or maybe, while the conflicts amid fairness and vengeance, rationality and faith, good and wickedness escalate, representative characters in a fable – which stops the whole thing truly becoming immersive.
Tonal Inconsistencies
And then, exist the many tonally jarring instances in which the pastor’s ability in finding evidence and discern Hilda’s fate turns nearly laughable. He stands observing broken milk pots and clumps of hair in hay barns like a combined the Belgian detective and Sherlock Holmes – alongside Jussi a rather hapless Hastings-cum-Watson (none of whom were required to lick a mixture of blood spatter and the boss’s spit to confirm that, yes, it was clearly dried blood at the crime scene), prior to declaring his newest conclusion and extracting a corpse out of a swamp.
Clashing Agendas
The local leaders are bent on proving that the maid was killed by a bear, perhaps to preserve the calm, or possibly to protect one of their own. The pastor is bent on establishing the opposite, and the evidence so quickly stacks up in his favour that again the drama’s plausibility and audience tolerance get strained. At its best, To Cook a Bear evokes memories of the TV version a few years ago of Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, through its portrayal of the competing allures and terrors presented by rational thought and religion. At its worst, it’s more like a bear-themed police procedural. Still, it does seem to offer the response to that debated question: “Ladies, take the bear.”
To Cook a Bear streams on Disney+ currently.
