An heated debate lately went viral on social media, following someone posed a query to women: would you rather be lost in a forest with a man or a bear? Like all the most engaging thought experiments, it revealed wildly different perspectives and life encounters, illuminated divides between the sexes, and could easily to induce a deep personal dilemma if you thought on it extensively. There was also the almost inevitable coda where some males took to the internet to tell females how stupid they had been for choosing the animal and went on to describe the punishments they deserved for it. This at least enabled those females 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 series is adapted from Swedish author Mikael Niemi’s 2018 book with the identical title (rendered two years later for an English audience). It follows the tribulations of a clergyman (the lead actor) and his family as they come 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 inhabitants especially warm to his puritanical approach to alcohol and dancing, but it is his defense of the poor – especially the native Sami population, from which comes the preacher’s adopted son the youth Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his conviction in societal fairness and equality that sets him on a collision course with the Kengis powers that be.
The Antagonists
Quickly collaborating opposing him are the sheriff the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the fearsome factory proprietor Madam Sjödahl (the actress), seen initially dismissing a recently mangled worker with minimal compensation as he remains babbling at the sight of his pulped hand, and anyone else who benefit from a community easily swayed for a few bottles of liquor sold by the unsettling store owner the merchant Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). Although, in fairness, Lindmark’s creepiness diminishes when itinerant painter the artist Beronius arrives in the story (Simon J Berger, providing an acting turn of exceptional unsettling intensity). While they remain – like the pastor himself – just slightly beyond being stereotypes, 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, the character Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), accordingly goes missing from the woods. Indications of her flight and bear markings upon a trunk are found yet she remains nowhere to be seen. Gossip and anxieties regarding a human-devouring bear prowling the woods spread, but the pastor has another theory that he and Jussi embark to verify.
A Strange Creation
This Bear Drama is a somewhat peculiar show. It conjures a fine sense of the bleakness that lets distrust and prejudice and grim legends thrive based on local folklore that bears might be dominated or inhabited by the souls of humans. And it doesn’t idealising the hardscrabble life led by the residents, in which brutality, whether that of the wild or people, lurks constantly on the edges, waiting to erupt. Yet the personas seldom evolve more than ciphers – or maybe, as the struggles between justice and vengeance, rationality and faith, virtue and evil intensify, representative characters within a moral tale – which stops the entire production fully coming to life.
Tonal Inconsistencies
Additionally, exist the many stylistically clashing instances where the clergyman’s skill in finding evidence and discern Hilda’s fate becomes almost risible. He stands observing shattered containers and clumps of hair in hay barns as a fusion of the Belgian detective the English sleuth – with Jussi a particularly unfortunate assistant figure (neither of whom had to lick a blend of blood spatter and the boss’s spit to agree that, yes, it was definitely coagulated blood at the crime scene), before announcing his newest conclusion and pulling a body out of a swamp.
Clashing Agendas
The local leaders are determined demonstrating that the maid was killed by a bear, perhaps to protect the peace, or possibly to shield one of their own. The pastor is intent on proving otherwise, and the proof so rapidly stacks up supporting his view that once more the drama’s plausibility and audience tolerance get strained. At its best, the series evokes memories of the TV version a few years ago of the author’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the competing attractions and terrors presented by science and religion. At its worst, it’s more like a bear-themed police procedural. Still, it appears to provide the answer to that debated question: “Ladies, take the bear.”
To Cook a Bear streams on Disney+ currently.
