A intense discussion recently spread widely across online platforms, following a user asked the question for females: would you rather find yourself stranded in a forest with a man or a bear? Like all the most engaging thought experiments, it revealed wildly different worldviews and experiences, highlighted chasms between the sexes, and could easily to induce a deep personal dilemma for anyone pondering about it for too long. Additionally, there came the almost inevitable coda in which some males came online to tell women how foolish they were for choosing the bear and went on to limn the punishments they deserved for it. This at least enabled those females who had been hesitating about their decision to decide with renewed assurance.
Portraying the Setup
To Cook a Bear effectively brings to life this nifty small premise. This six-episode drama is based from Swedish author Mikael Niemi’s 2018 novel with the identical title (translated two years later for English readers). It follows the tribulations of a pastor (the lead actor) and his household when they arrive to start a fresh religious post in Kengis, a remote village in Sweden’s north, during the mid-19th century. In a place with few pleasures, none of the inhabitants particularly warm to his strict approach to drinking and dancing, yet it is his protection of impoverished people – especially the native Sami population, from among whom comes the pastor’s foster child Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his conviction in societal fairness and equal rights that sets him on a collision course against the Kengis local authorities.
The Antagonists
Quickly collaborating opposing him include the sheriff the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the fearsome mill owner the matron Sjödahl (the actress), observed initially dismissing a newly injured worker with minimal compensation while he is still gibbering at the sight of his pulped hand, and anyone else who benefit from a populace easily swayed for a few bottles of liquor provided by the unsettling shopkeeper Lindmark (the actor). Although, in fairness, Lindmark’s eeriness pales when travelling artist the artist Beronius arrives in the story (the performer, providing an acting turn of exceptional discomfiting power). If they are – like the pastor himself – only a little more than caricatures, they still serve as effective ones.
Plot Progression
With the seeds of conflict sown, it is time to proceed with the storyline. The maid from the doctor’s house, the character Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), accordingly goes missing from the woods. Indications of her flight and animal scratches upon a trunk are found yet she remains nowhere to be seen. Gossip and fears of a man/maid-eating bear prowling the woods spread, yet the clergyman has another theory which he and his ward embark to verify.
A Strange Creation
This Bear Drama is a somewhat odd beast. It conjures a fine sense of the bleakness that lets suspicion and prejudice and dark myths thrive from the native legend that bears can be controlled or inhabited by the spirits of men. It avoids idealising the hardscrabble life led by the residents, in which violence, be it from the wild or mankind, lurks constantly at the periphery, poised to explode. Yet the personas seldom evolve beyond symbols – or perhaps, while the conflicts amid fairness and vengeance, rationality and faith, good and evil escalate, representative characters within a moral tale – preventing the entire production fully coming to life.
Stylistic Shifts
And then, exist the many tonally jarring moments where the pastor’s ability to discover clues and determine Hilda’s fate turns almost risible. He stands observing broken milk pots and clumps of hair in hay barns like a combined Hercule Poirot the English sleuth – with Jussi a particularly unfortunate assistant figure (none of whom had to lick a blend of blood spatter and saliva from his superior 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 village elite are determined proving that the maid was killed by an animal, maybe to protect the calm, or possibly to shield a fellow elite. The clergyman is intent on establishing otherwise, and the evidence so quickly stacks up supporting his view that once more the show’s credibility 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, with its evocation of the opposing attractions and terrors presented by science and religion. At its worst, it resembles Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Still, it appears to offer the answer to the earlier query: “Ladies, take the bear.”
To Cook a Bear is on Disney+ now.
