🔗 Share this article

A intense discussion recently spread widely on social media, after someone asked the question to women: which would you prefer be lost in a forest alongside a male or with a bear? Like all the best thought experiments, it revealed wildly different perspectives and experiences, highlighted chasms between the sexes, and was likely cause a deep personal dilemma if you thought about it for too long. Additionally, there came the predictable coda in which some males came online to tell women how foolish they had been to select the animal and proceeded to describe the punishments they merited for it. This at least allowed those females who were uncertain over their choice to decide with a new confidence.

Portraying the Scenario

To Cook a Bear skillfully brings to life this clever little setup. This six-episode series is adapted from Scandinavian writer the novelist’s 2018 novel of the same name (translated two years later for English readers). It follows the struggles of a pastor (the lead actor) and his family when they arrive to begin a fresh religious post in Kengis, a remote village in northern Sweden, during the mid-19th century. In a place with few pleasures, none of the inhabitants particularly appreciate his puritanical stance on alcohol and dancing, but it is his defense of impoverished people – particularly the native Sami population, from which hails the preacher’s foster child the youth Jussi (the young actor) – and his belief in societal fairness and equality that places him on a collision course against the Kengis local authorities.

The Antagonists

Quickly in cahoots against him include the lawman Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the fearsome factory proprietor the matron Sjödahl (the actress), seen early on firing a recently mangled laborer with a month’s pay as he remains gibbering at the sight his crushed hand, and all others who benefit from a populace easily swayed with some containers of liquor provided by the unsettling shopkeeper Lindmark (the actor). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s creepiness pales once itinerant painter the artist Beronius arrives on the scene (the performer, delivering a performance of rare unsettling intensity). While they remain – similar to the clergyman – only a little more than caricatures, they are at least effective ones.

Plot Progression

Once the foundations of tension sown, the moment arrives to get down with the storyline. The servant from the doctor’s house, the character Hilda (the actress), duly vanishes in the forest. Signs of her escape and bear markings upon a trunk get discovered but she is completely absent. Gossip and fears regarding a human-devouring bear roaming the woodland spread, yet the clergyman has another theory which he and his ward embark to prove.

An Odd Beast

To Cook a Bear is a somewhat odd beast. It creates a fine sense of the bleakness that lets distrust and bias and dark myths flourish based on local folklore that animals might be dominated or inhabited by the souls of men. It avoids idealising the hardscrabble life experienced by the villagers, where violence, be it from nature or mankind, always looms at the periphery, poised to explode. But the characters rarely become more than ciphers – or maybe, as the struggles between justice and vengeance, logic and faith, good and evil intensify, representative characters within a moral tale – which stops the entire production truly coming to life.

Stylistic Shifts

Additionally, exist the many stylistically clashing moments in which the clergyman’s skill in finding evidence and discern the maid’s destiny becomes nearly laughable. He positions himself looking at broken milk pots and strands of fur in hay barns as a fusion of Hercule Poirot and Sherlock Holmes – with Jussi a particularly unfortunate Hastings-cum-Watson (none of whom were required to lick a blend of blood spatter and the boss’s spit to confirm that, yes, it was clearly coagulated blood on the site), before announcing his latest deduction and extracting a corpse from a bog.

Clashing Agendas

The local leaders are determined demonstrating that the maid met her end by a bear, maybe to preserve the peace, or possibly to protect one of their own. The pastor is intent on establishing the opposite, and the proof so quickly stacks up in his favour that again the drama’s plausibility and the viewer’s patience get strained. In its finest moments, the series is reminiscent of the adaptation a few years ago of Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, through its portrayal of the opposing attractions and fears presented by science and religion. At its worst, it’s more like a bear-themed police procedural. Still, it appears to provide the answer to that debated question: “Ladies, take the bear.”

• The series is on Disney+ currently.