A intense debate recently spread widely across online platforms, following someone posed the question to women: would you rather find yourself stranded in the woods with a man or with a bear? Similar to the best thought experiments, it revealed vastly opposing worldviews and life encounters, illuminated divides among genders, and could easily cause a deep personal dilemma if you thought on it extensively. There was also the almost inevitable follow-up in which some males came online to inform females how stupid they were for choosing the animal and proceeded to describe the punishments they merited for that choice. This at least enabled the women who had been hesitating about their decision to decide with a new confidence.
Dramatising the Scenario
To Cook a Bear skillfully dramatises this clever little setup. This six-episode drama is adapted from Scandinavian writer Mikael Niemi’s 2018 novel of the same name (translated in 2020 for an English audience). It traces the struggles of a clergyman (the lead actor) and his family as they come to start a new ministry within Kengis, a remote settlement in Sweden’s north, during the mid-19th century. In a place with few pleasures, none of the inhabitants particularly warm to his puritanical approach to alcohol and dancing, yet it is his defense of impoverished people – especially the indigenous Sami, from which comes the preacher’s adopted son the youth Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in social justice and equality that places him in direct opposition against the Kengis local authorities.
The Opposing Forces
Quickly in cahoots opposing him are the lawman the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the fearsome factory proprietor the matron Sjödahl (the actress), seen initially firing a recently mangled laborer with a month’s pay while he is still gibbering at the sight his crushed hand, and anyone else who benefit from a populace who can be bought for a few bottles of liquor sold by the unsettling shopkeeper Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). Although, in fairness, Lindmark’s creepiness diminishes once travelling artist Beronius arrives on the scene (Simon J Berger, providing a performance of exceptional unsettling intensity). If they are – like the pastor himself – just slightly beyond being stereotypes, they are at least effective ones.
Narrative Development
With the seeds of conflict planted, the moment arrives to proceed to narrative business. The maid employed by the doctor, the character Hilda (the actress), duly goes missing from the woods. Indications of her flight and animal scratches upon a trunk get discovered but she is completely absent. Rumours and anxieties regarding a human-devouring beast prowling the woodland spread, yet the clergyman has another theory that he and Jussi set out to verify.
An Odd Beast
This Bear Drama is a somewhat odd beast. It creates a strong impression of the bleakness that allows suspicion and bias and grim legends flourish based on local folklore that bears might be dominated or inhabited by the spirits of men. And it doesn’t idealising the tough existence experienced by the residents, where violence, be it from the wild or people, always looms at the periphery, waiting to erupt. Yet the personas rarely become more than ciphers – or perhaps, while the conflicts between justice and revenge, rationality and religion, good and evil intensify, representative characters within a moral tale – which stops the whole thing fully becoming immersive.
Stylistic Shifts
And then, there are the many tonally jarring moments where the pastor’s ability to discover clues and discern Hilda’s fate turns nearly laughable. He positions himself looking at shattered containers and strands of fur within storage sheds as a fusion of Hercule Poirot the English sleuth – with Jussi a particularly unfortunate assistant figure (neither of whom had to taste a blend of blood spatter and saliva from his superior to agree that, yes, it was clearly dried blood at the crime scene), prior to declaring his newest conclusion and pulling a corpse out of a swamp.
Clashing Agendas
The village elite are bent on proving that Hilda was killed by an animal, perhaps to preserve the calm, perhaps to shield one of their own. The pastor is bent on establishing the opposite, and the proof so quickly accumulates in his favour that again the drama’s plausibility and audience tolerance get strained. In its finest moments, To Cook a Bear evokes memories of the TV version some years back of the author’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the competing attractions and fears presented by science and belief. At its worst, it resembles a bear-themed police procedural. Nevertheless, it does seem to provide the answer to that debated question: “Females, choose the animal.”
The series streams on Disney+ currently.
