A heated discussion lately spread widely across online platforms, following someone posed a query for females: would you rather find yourself stranded in a forest alongside a male or with a bear? Like all the best hypothetical scenarios, it exposed wildly different worldviews and life encounters, highlighted divides between the sexes, and could easily cause an existential crisis if you thought on it extensively. Additionally, there came the predictable follow-up in which some males took to the internet to tell women how foolish they were to select the animal and proceeded to describe the consequences they merited for that choice. This at least enabled the women who had been hesitating over their choice to decide with renewed assurance.
Portraying the Scenario
To Cook a Bear skillfully dramatises this clever small premise. This six-episode drama is adapted from Scandinavian writer Mikael Niemi’s 2018 novel with the identical title (translated in 2020 for an English audience). It traces the tribulations of a pastor (the lead actor) and his household as they come to start a new ministry within 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 stance on alcohol and revelry, yet it is his defense of the poor – especially the indigenous Sami, from among whom hails the pastor’s foster child the youth Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his conviction in societal fairness and equality that places him in direct opposition with the Kengis powers that be.
The Opposing Forces
Quickly collaborating opposing him include the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the intimidating factory proprietor the matron Sjödahl (Pernilla August), seen early on firing a newly injured worker with a month’s pay as he remains babbling at the sight his crushed hand, and all others who profit from a community who can be bought for a few bottles of the whisky sold by the creepy shopkeeper the merchant Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). Although, to be fair, Lindmark’s creepiness diminishes when itinerant painter the artist Beronius arrives on the scene (Simon J Berger, providing a performance of rare unsettling intensity). While they remain – similar to the clergyman – only a little more being stereotypes, they still serve as effective ones.
Narrative Development
Once the foundations of tension sown, it is time to proceed with the storyline. The servant employed by the doctor, the character Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), duly vanishes from the woods. Signs of her escape and animal scratches on a tree get discovered but she is completely absent. Rumours and fears regarding a human-devouring beast roaming the woodland circulate, but the pastor has another theory that he and Jussi embark to verify.
An Odd Beast
This Bear Drama is a slightly peculiar show. It creates a strong impression of the desolation that lets distrust and prejudice and dark myths flourish based on local folklore that animals can be controlled or inhabited by the spirits of humans. It avoids romanticise the hardscrabble life experienced by the villagers, in which violence, be it from nature or people, always looms on the edges, waiting to erupt. Yet the personas seldom evolve more than ciphers – or maybe, while the conflicts between justice and revenge, logic and religion, virtue and evil escalate, representative characters within a moral tale – preventing the whole thing truly becoming immersive.
Stylistic Shifts
And then, there are the many stylistically clashing instances where the pastor’s ability in finding evidence and determine the maid’s destiny turns nearly laughable. He positions himself observing shattered containers and clumps of hair in hay barns like a combined the Belgian detective and Sherlock Holmes – alongside Jussi a particularly unfortunate Hastings-cum-Watson (none of whom had to taste a mixture of blood spatter and the boss’s spit to agree that indeed, it was definitely dried blood on the site), prior to declaring his newest conclusion and pulling a corpse out of a swamp.
Opposing Goals
The local leaders are bent on demonstrating that the maid was killed by a bear, perhaps to preserve the calm, perhaps to shield a fellow elite. The clergyman is bent on proving otherwise, and the evidence so quickly stacks up supporting his view that again the drama’s plausibility and the viewer’s patience get strained. At its best, the series is reminiscent of the adaptation a few years ago of the author’s The Essex Serpent, through its portrayal of the competing allures and fears presented by science and belief. In its low points, it resembles a bear-themed police procedural. Still, it appears to offer the answer to the earlier query: “Females, choose the animal.”
The series is on Disney+ currently.
