An heated debate recently went viral on social media, following a user asked the question to women: which would you prefer be lost in a forest alongside a male or a bear? Like all the best thought experiments, it exposed vastly opposing worldviews and experiences, highlighted chasms between the sexes, and could easily cause an existential crisis if you thought about it extensively. There was also the predictable coda where some males came online to tell females how stupid they were for choosing the animal and proceeded to limn the consequences they merited for it. This at least enabled those females who were uncertain about their decision to make it with renewed assurance.
Portraying the Scenario
To Cook a Bear skillfully dramatises this clever small premise. This six-episode series is adapted from Swedish author Mikael Niemi’s 2018 novel of the same name (translated in 2020 for English readers). It traces the tribulations of a clergyman (the lead actor) and his household as they come to start a new ministry in Kengis, a remote settlement in Sweden’s north, in 1852. In a place lacking many joys, none of the inhabitants especially warm to his puritanical approach to alcohol and revelry, yet it is his protection of the poor – especially the native Sami population, from among whom hails the pastor’s foster child the youth Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in social justice and equal rights that sets him on a collision course against the Kengis powers that be.
The Antagonists
Soon collaborating opposing him are the lawman the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the intimidating factory proprietor the matron Sjödahl (the actress), observed initially firing a newly injured laborer with minimal compensation while he is still babbling upon seeing his crushed hand, and all others who profit from a community easily swayed for a few bottles of liquor sold by the creepy shopkeeper the merchant Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). Although, in fairness, Lindmark’s creepiness pales when travelling artist Beronius appears in the story (the performer, delivering a performance of exceptional unsettling intensity). While they remain – like the pastor himself – only a little more than caricatures, they still serve as potent archetypes.
Plot Progression
Once the foundations of tension planted, the moment arrives to get down to narrative business. The maid employed by the doctor, Hilda (the actress), accordingly goes missing from the woods. Signs of her flight and bear markings upon a trunk get discovered yet she remains completely absent. Rumours and fears of a man/maid-eating bear roaming the woodland circulate, yet the clergyman has another theory that he and Jussi set out to verify.
A Strange Creation
This Bear Drama is a slightly odd beast. It conjures a strong impression of the desolation that allows distrust and prejudice and dark myths flourish based on local folklore that bears can be controlled or inhabited by the souls of humans. It avoids idealising the hardscrabble life led by the residents, in which brutality, whether that of nature or people, always looms on the edges, waiting to erupt. Yet the personas seldom evolve beyond symbols – or perhaps, as the struggles amid fairness and revenge, rationality and faith, virtue and wickedness escalate, representative characters within a moral tale – which stops the whole thing fully coming to life.
Stylistic Shifts
Additionally, exist the many stylistically clashing moments in which the pastor’s ability in finding evidence and determine Hilda’s fate becomes almost risible. He stands looking at broken milk pots and clumps of hair in hay barns as a fusion of Hercule Poirot the English sleuth – with Jussi a rather hapless assistant figure (neither of whom had to taste a mixture of blood droplets and the boss’s spit to agree that indeed, it was clearly dried blood on the site), prior to declaring his latest deduction and pulling a corpse out of a swamp.
Opposing Goals
The local leaders are determined demonstrating that the maid met her end by a bear, maybe to protect the calm, perhaps to protect one of their own. The clergyman is intent on establishing the opposite, and the evidence so rapidly accumulates supporting his view that again the drama’s plausibility and the viewer’s patience are tested. At its best, the series evokes memories of the adaptation a few years ago of Sarah Perry’s the serpent tale, through its portrayal of the competing allures and fears presented by science and belief. At its worst, it resembles Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Still, it does seem to offer the answer to the earlier query: “Ladies, take the bear.”
The series streams on Disney+ now.
