A heated debate lately went viral on social media, after someone asked the question to women: would you rather be lost in the woods with a man or a bear? Like all the most engaging thought experiments, it revealed vastly opposing perspectives and experiences, highlighted divides among genders, and could easily to induce a deep personal dilemma for anyone pondering on it extensively. Additionally, there came the almost inevitable follow-up where men of a certain stripe took to the internet to tell females how foolish they had been to select the animal and proceeded to limn the punishments they deserved for it. This at minimum allowed the women who had been hesitating over their choice to make it with renewed assurance.
Portraying the Scenario
To Cook a Bear skillfully brings to life this clever little setup. This six-episode drama is adapted on Swedish author Mikael Niemi’s 2018 book of the same name (rendered two years later for English readers). It follows the tribulations of a clergyman (the lead actor) and his household when they arrive to start a new ministry in Kengis, a remote village in Sweden’s north, in 1852. Within a community lacking many joys, none of the inhabitants particularly appreciate his puritanical approach to alcohol and revelry, but it is his defense of the poor – especially the indigenous Sami, from among whom comes the preacher’s foster child Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in social justice and equal rights that sets him in direct opposition with the Kengis local authorities.
The Opposing Forces
Quickly collaborating opposing him include the lawman Brahe (the performer), the fearsome factory proprietor Madam Sjödahl (Pernilla August), seen initially firing a newly injured laborer with minimal compensation as he remains gibbering upon seeing of his pulped hand, and anyone else who benefit from a populace easily swayed with some containers of the whisky sold by the creepy store owner Lindmark (the actor). However, in fairness, Lindmark’s creepiness pales once itinerant painter Beronius appears on the scene (Simon J Berger, providing an acting turn of exceptional unsettling intensity). If they are – similar to the clergyman – only a little more than caricatures, they are at least effective ones.
Narrative Development
With the seeds of tension planted, it is time to get down with the storyline. The maid from the doctor’s house, Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), duly goes missing in the forest. Signs of her escape and bear markings on a tree get discovered but she is completely absent. Rumours and anxieties of a man/maid-eating beast roaming the woods circulate, yet the clergyman holds a different view that he and Jussi embark to verify.
A Strange Creation
This Bear Drama is a somewhat odd beast. It conjures a fine sense of the desolation that lets suspicion and bias and dark myths flourish from the native legend that bears can be controlled or possessed by the souls of humans. It avoids idealising the hardscrabble life experienced by the residents, in which violence, be it from the wild or mankind, always looms at the periphery, waiting to erupt. But the characters rarely become more than ciphers – or maybe, as the struggles between justice and vengeance, rationality and faith, good and evil intensify, representative characters in a fable – preventing the entire production fully coming to life.
Tonal Inconsistencies
And then, exist the many tonally jarring instances where the clergyman’s skill to discover clues and determine the maid’s destiny becomes nearly laughable. He stands observing shattered containers and strands of fur in hay barns as a fusion of the Belgian detective the English sleuth – alongside Jussi a particularly unfortunate Hastings-cum-Watson (neither of whom were required to lick a mixture of blood droplets and saliva from his superior to agree that indeed, it was clearly dried blood at the crime scene), before announcing his newest conclusion and extracting a body from a bog.
Clashing Agendas
The local leaders are bent on proving that the maid was killed by an animal, perhaps to preserve the calm, or possibly to protect a fellow elite. The clergyman is bent on establishing the opposite, and the proof so quickly accumulates supporting his view that again the drama’s plausibility and audience tolerance are tested. In its finest moments, the series is reminiscent of the adaptation some years back of the author’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the competing allures and fears presented by science and belief. In its low points, it resembles Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Nevertheless, it appears to provide the answer to the earlier query: “Ladies, take the bear.”
To Cook a Bear streams on Disney+ currently.
