An heated discussion recently went viral on social media, following a user posed the question for females: which would you prefer be lost in the woods with a man or with a bear? Like all the best hypothetical scenarios, it revealed vastly opposing perspectives and life encounters, illuminated divides among genders, and was likely cause an existential crisis for anyone pondering on it extensively. There was also the predictable coda in which men of a certain stripe took to the internet to inform females how stupid they were to select the animal and went on to limn the punishments they merited for it. This at minimum allowed those females who were uncertain over their choice to decide with renewed assurance.
Dramatising the Scenario
To Cook a Bear effectively brings to life this nifty small premise. The six-part series is adapted on Scandinavian writer Mikael Niemi’s 2018 book of the same name (translated two years later for English readers). It traces the struggles of a pastor (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his family as they come to begin a new ministry in Kengis, a remote settlement in Sweden’s north, in 1852. Within a community with few pleasures, not one of the locals particularly warm to his puritanical stance on alcohol and revelry, yet it is his protection of impoverished people – especially the native Sami population, from which hails the pastor’s adopted son Jussi (the young actor) – and his conviction in societal fairness and equality that places him on a collision course against the Kengis powers that be.
The Opposing Forces
Soon in cahoots opposing him include the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the fearsome factory proprietor the matron Sjödahl (the actress), observed initially firing a recently mangled worker with minimal compensation while he is still gibbering at the sight of his pulped hand, and all others who benefit from a community easily swayed with some containers of liquor sold by the creepy store owner the merchant Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s eeriness diminishes when travelling artist the artist Beronius arrives on the scene (the performer, delivering an acting turn of rare unsettling intensity). If they are – like the pastor himself – just slightly beyond than caricatures, they are at least effective ones.
Plot Progression
With the seeds of tension planted, the moment arrives to proceed with the storyline. The maid from the doctor’s house, Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), duly goes missing from the woods. Signs of her escape and bear markings on a tree get discovered yet she remains nowhere to be seen. Gossip and anxieties of a man/maid-eating bear roaming the woodland circulate, yet the clergyman holds a different view which he and his ward set out to prove.
An Odd Beast
This Bear Drama is a somewhat odd beast. It creates a fine sense of the bleakness that lets suspicion and bias and grim legends flourish based on local folklore that animals might be dominated or inhabited by the souls of men. And it doesn’t romanticise the tough existence experienced by the residents, where violence, be it from nature or mankind, always looms at the periphery, poised to explode. Yet the personas rarely become more than ciphers – or maybe, while the conflicts amid fairness and vengeance, logic and religion, virtue and evil escalate, representative characters in a fable – preventing the whole thing truly becoming immersive.
Tonal Inconsistencies
Additionally, there are numerous tonally jarring moments in which the pastor’s ability to discover clues and discern Hilda’s fate becomes nearly laughable. He positions himself observing shattered containers and clumps of hair within storage sheds like a combined the Belgian detective the English sleuth – with Jussi a rather hapless Hastings-cum-Watson (none of whom had to lick a mixture of blood droplets and the boss’s spit to agree that indeed, it was definitely coagulated blood on the site), before announcing his latest deduction and pulling a body from a bog.
Opposing Goals
The village elite are determined demonstrating that Hilda met her end by a bear, perhaps to protect the peace, or possibly to protect one of their own. The clergyman is bent on proving otherwise, and the evidence so rapidly stacks up supporting his view that once more the drama’s plausibility and audience tolerance get strained. At its best, 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 rational thought and religion. In its low points, it resembles Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Nevertheless, it does seem to provide the response to that debated question: “Ladies, take the bear.”
The series streams on Disney+ currently.
