An intense debate recently went viral on social media, after someone posed a query to women: which would you prefer find yourself stranded in the woods alongside a male or with a bear? Like all the most engaging hypothetical scenarios, it revealed wildly different perspectives and life encounters, illuminated divides between the sexes, and could easily cause a deep personal dilemma for anyone pondering about it extensively. There was also the predictable follow-up where some males came online to tell females how stupid they had been to select the animal and proceeded to limn the consequences they deserved for it. This at least allowed the women who were uncertain about their decision to make it with a new confidence.
Portraying the Scenario
To Cook a Bear skillfully brings to life this clever small premise. This six-episode drama is adapted from Swedish author Mikael Niemi’s 2018 novel of the same name (translated in 2020 for English readers). It follows the struggles of a clergyman (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his family as they come to start a fresh religious post in Kengis, an isolated settlement in northern Sweden, during the mid-19th century. Within a community with few pleasures, none of the locals especially appreciate his strict approach to drinking and revelry, yet it is his defense of the poor – particularly the indigenous Sami, from which comes the pastor’s foster child Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his conviction in societal fairness and equal rights that places him on a collision course with the Kengis local authorities.
The Opposing Forces
Quickly in cahoots against him are the lawman Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the intimidating mill owner Madam Sjödahl (the actress), seen initially firing a newly injured laborer with minimal compensation as he remains gibbering upon seeing of his pulped hand, and all others who profit from a community easily swayed with some containers of liquor provided by the unsettling shopkeeper Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). However, in fairness, Lindmark’s creepiness diminishes when itinerant painter the artist Beronius appears in the story (the performer, delivering an acting turn of rare discomfiting power). If they are – like the pastor himself – just slightly beyond being stereotypes, they are at least potent archetypes.
Narrative Development
With the seeds of tension sown, the moment arrives to get down to narrative business. The maid from the doctor’s house, Hilda (the actress), duly goes missing in the forest. Signs of her escape and animal scratches on a tree get discovered but she is nowhere to be seen. Gossip and anxieties regarding a human-devouring beast prowling the woods spread, but the pastor holds a different view which he and his ward set out to verify.
A Strange Creation
This Bear Drama is a somewhat peculiar show. It conjures a strong impression of the bleakness that allows distrust and bias and dark myths thrive based on local folklore that bears might be dominated or possessed by the spirits of men. And it doesn’t romanticise the hardscrabble life experienced by the villagers, in which brutality, be it from nature or people, always looms at the periphery, poised to explode. But the characters rarely become more than ciphers – or perhaps, while the conflicts between justice and revenge, rationality and faith, good and evil intensify, representative characters within a moral tale – preventing the entire production truly coming to life.
Stylistic Shifts
And then, there are numerous tonally jarring instances in which the pastor’s ability to discover clues and determine the maid’s destiny becomes almost risible. He positions himself observing shattered containers and clumps of hair in hay barns as a fusion of Hercule Poirot and Sherlock Holmes – with Jussi a rather hapless assistant figure (neither of whom were required to taste 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 latest deduction and pulling a body out of a swamp.
Opposing Goals
The village elite are determined proving that Hilda was killed by a bear, maybe to preserve the calm, perhaps to shield a fellow elite. The pastor is intent on proving the opposite, and the proof so quickly stacks up in his favour that once more the show’s credibility and audience tolerance are tested. In its finest moments, the series evokes memories of the TV version some years back of the author’s the serpent tale, through its portrayal of the opposing attractions and fears offered by rational thought and belief. At its worst, it’s more like a bear-themed police procedural. Still, it does seem to offer the response to the earlier query: “Females, choose the animal.”
The series streams on Disney+ now.
