🔗 Share this article

An intense discussion recently spread widely on social media, after a user posed the question to women: would you rather find yourself stranded in a forest with a man or with a bear? Like all the best thought experiments, it revealed wildly different perspectives and experiences, highlighted divides between the sexes, and could easily to induce a deep personal dilemma if you thought about it for too long. Additionally, there came the almost inevitable coda where men of a certain stripe came online to tell women how foolish they were for choosing the bear and went on to describe the punishments they deserved for it. This at minimum allowed the women who had been hesitating about their decision to make it with renewed assurance.

Dramatising the Setup

To Cook a Bear skillfully dramatises this clever small premise. The six-part series is based from Swedish author Mikael Niemi’s 2018 novel with the identical title (rendered two years later for an English audience). It follows the struggles of a pastor (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his family as they come to begin a fresh religious post within Kengis, a remote settlement in Sweden’s north, in 1852. In a place lacking many joys, none of the locals especially warm to his strict approach to drinking and dancing, but it is his protection of the poor – especially the indigenous Sami, from which hails the pastor’s adopted son Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in social justice and equality that places him on a collision course with the Kengis local authorities.

The Opposing Forces

Soon in cahoots against him are the lawman the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the fearsome factory proprietor the matron Sjödahl (Pernilla August), observed initially dismissing a recently mangled laborer with minimal compensation as he remains babbling upon seeing his crushed hand, and anyone else who profit from a populace easily swayed with some containers of the whisky provided by the unsettling store owner Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). Although, to be fair, Lindmark’s creepiness pales when itinerant painter the artist Beronius arrives in the story (the performer, providing an acting turn of rare discomfiting power). While they remain – similar to the clergyman – only a little more being stereotypes, they still serve as potent archetypes.

Narrative Development

Once the foundations of conflict sown, the moment arrives to proceed to narrative business. The maid employed by the doctor, the character Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), accordingly vanishes in the forest. Signs of her flight and animal scratches upon a trunk get discovered but she is completely absent. Gossip and anxieties regarding a human-devouring bear roaming the woodland spread, yet the clergyman has another theory which he and his ward set out to verify.

A Strange Creation

This Bear Drama is a somewhat odd beast. It conjures a fine sense of the bleakness that allows distrust and bias and grim legends flourish from the native legend that bears might be dominated or possessed by the spirits of humans. It avoids idealising the tough existence led by the villagers, where violence, whether that of the wild or people, lurks constantly at the periphery, waiting to erupt. But the characters rarely become beyond symbols – or maybe, as the struggles between justice and revenge, rationality and faith, good and evil escalate, representative characters in a fable – which stops the whole thing truly becoming immersive.

Tonal Inconsistencies

Additionally, there are numerous stylistically clashing moments where the pastor’s ability in finding evidence and discern Hilda’s fate becomes nearly laughable. He positions himself looking at shattered containers and strands of fur within storage sheds as a fusion of the Belgian detective and Sherlock Holmes – alongside Jussi a rather hapless Hastings-cum-Watson (none of whom were required to lick a mixture of blood spatter and saliva from his superior to agree that, yes, it was definitely coagulated blood at the crime scene), before announcing his latest deduction and pulling a corpse out of a swamp.

Opposing Goals

The local leaders are bent on proving that the maid was killed by an animal, maybe to protect the peace, perhaps to shield one of their own. The pastor is bent on establishing the opposite, and the proof so quickly stacks up supporting his view that once more the drama’s plausibility and the viewer’s patience are tested. At its best, To Cook a Bear 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 offered by rational thought and religion. In its low points, it resembles a bear-themed police procedural. Nevertheless, it appears to offer the answer to the earlier query: “Females, choose the animal.”

• To Cook a Bear is on Disney+ currently.