An intense debate lately went viral on social media, after a user posed a query for females: would you rather be lost in the woods with a man or a bear? Similar to the most engaging thought experiments, it exposed vastly opposing perspectives and experiences, illuminated divides between the sexes, and was likely cause a deep personal dilemma if you thought on it extensively. There was also the almost inevitable follow-up where some males took to the internet to inform females how foolish they were to select the animal and went on to limn the consequences they merited for that choice. This at least allowed the women who had been hesitating about their decision to make it with a new confidence.
Portraying the Setup
To Cook a Bear skillfully dramatises this clever small premise. The six-part drama is adapted on Scandinavian writer Mikael Niemi’s 2018 book of the same name (translated two years later for an English audience). It follows the struggles of a pastor (the lead actor) and his household as they come to begin a fresh religious post in Kengis, a remote village in Sweden’s north, in 1852. In a place with few pleasures, none of the locals particularly warm to his strict approach to alcohol and dancing, but it is his defense of impoverished people – particularly the indigenous Sami, from which hails the pastor’s adopted son Jussi (the young actor) – and his belief in social justice and equality that places him on a collision course against the Kengis local authorities.
The Opposing Forces
Soon collaborating against him include the lawman Brahe (the performer), the intimidating mill owner Madam Sjödahl (the actress), observed early on dismissing a recently mangled laborer with minimal compensation while he is still gibbering at the sight of his pulped hand, and anyone else who benefit from a community easily swayed for a few bottles of the whisky provided by the unsettling store owner the merchant Lindmark (the actor). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s creepiness diminishes once travelling artist the artist Beronius arrives on the scene (the performer, providing an acting turn of exceptional unsettling intensity). While they remain – similar to the clergyman – only a little more than caricatures, they still serve as potent archetypes.
Plot Progression
With the seeds of conflict planted, it is time to get down to narrative business. The maid from the doctor’s house, Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), duly vanishes in the forest. Signs of her flight and animal scratches on a tree are found yet she remains nowhere to be seen. Rumours and anxieties of a man/maid-eating beast prowling the woodland spread, but the pastor has another theory that he and Jussi set out to prove.
An Odd Beast
This Bear Drama is a slightly peculiar show. It conjures a fine sense of the desolation that lets suspicion and prejudice and grim legends thrive from the native legend that animals might be dominated or inhabited by the souls of humans. And it doesn’t idealising the tough existence experienced by the residents, where brutality, whether that of nature or mankind, always looms at the periphery, poised to explode. But the characters rarely become beyond symbols – or perhaps, while the conflicts amid fairness and vengeance, rationality and faith, good and wickedness escalate, emblematic figures within a moral tale – which stops the whole thing truly coming to life.
Stylistic Shifts
And then, there are numerous stylistically clashing instances where the pastor’s ability in finding evidence and determine the maid’s destiny becomes nearly laughable. He stands looking at broken milk pots and clumps of hair in hay barns as a fusion of the Belgian detective and Sherlock Holmes – with Jussi a rather hapless Hastings-cum-Watson (neither of whom were required to lick a mixture of blood spatter and saliva from his superior to agree that, yes, it was clearly coagulated blood on the site), prior to declaring his newest conclusion and extracting a body from a bog.
Opposing Goals
The village elite are bent on proving that Hilda met her end by an animal, maybe to preserve the calm, or possibly to protect one of their own. The pastor is bent on establishing the opposite, and the proof so rapidly stacks up in his favour that once more the show’s credibility and the viewer’s patience get strained. In its finest moments, To Cook a Bear is reminiscent 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 belief. At its worst, it resembles a bear-themed police procedural. Nevertheless, it appears to provide the answer to the earlier query: “Females, choose the animal.”
To Cook a Bear is on Disney+ currently.
