🔗 Share this article

A heated discussion recently spread widely across online platforms, after a user asked the question to women: which would you prefer find yourself stranded in the woods alongside a male or with a bear? Like all the most engaging hypothetical scenarios, it exposed wildly different worldviews and life encounters, illuminated chasms between the sexes, and was likely to induce a deep personal dilemma if you thought about it for too long. There was also the predictable follow-up where some males took to the internet to tell women how stupid they were to select the bear and proceeded to limn the consequences they merited for that choice. This at least allowed those females who had been hesitating about their decision to make it with a new confidence.

Portraying the Scenario

To Cook a Bear effectively dramatises this nifty little setup. This six-episode series is adapted on Scandinavian writer Mikael Niemi’s 2018 novel of the same name (translated two years later for English readers). It follows the tribulations of a pastor (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his family when they arrive to start a fresh religious post within Kengis, a remote settlement in northern Sweden, in 1852. Within a community with few pleasures, not one of the locals especially appreciate his strict stance on drinking and dancing, yet it is his defense of the poor – especially the native Sami population, from which comes the pastor’s adopted son Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his conviction in social justice and equal rights that places him on a collision course against the Kengis local authorities.

The Antagonists

Soon collaborating against him include the sheriff the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the intimidating mill owner the matron Sjödahl (Pernilla August), seen initially dismissing a newly injured laborer with a month’s pay while he is still gibbering at the sight his crushed hand, and anyone else who profit from a community who can be bought for a few bottles of the whisky provided by the creepy shopkeeper the merchant Lindmark (the actor). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s creepiness pales once itinerant painter the artist Beronius arrives on the scene (Simon J Berger, delivering an acting turn of rare discomfiting power). While they remain – like the pastor himself – just slightly beyond than caricatures, they are at least effective ones.

Plot Progression

With the seeds of conflict sown, the moment arrives to get down to narrative business. The servant employed by the doctor, the character Hilda (the actress), accordingly goes missing in the forest. Signs of her flight and animal scratches upon a trunk are found but she is nowhere to be seen. Gossip and fears of a man/maid-eating beast prowling the woods spread, but the pastor 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 strong impression of the desolation that allows suspicion and prejudice and grim legends thrive based on local folklore that animals can be controlled or possessed by the souls of humans. It avoids romanticise the hardscrabble life experienced by the villagers, in which violence, be it from nature or people, always looms at the periphery, poised to explode. Yet the personas rarely become beyond symbols – or perhaps, as the struggles amid fairness and revenge, logic and religion, good and wickedness intensify, emblematic figures within a moral tale – which stops the entire production fully becoming immersive.

Stylistic Shifts

Additionally, exist the many tonally jarring moments in which the clergyman’s skill in finding evidence and determine Hilda’s fate turns almost risible. He positions himself looking at broken milk pots and strands of fur in hay barns like a combined Hercule Poirot the English sleuth – alongside Jussi a rather hapless assistant figure (neither of whom were required to taste a blend of blood spatter and the boss’s spit to agree that indeed, it was clearly coagulated blood on the site), before announcing his newest conclusion and extracting a corpse from a bog.

Opposing Goals

The local leaders are determined proving that the maid was killed by a bear, maybe to preserve the peace, or possibly to shield a fellow elite. The pastor is bent on establishing otherwise, and the evidence so quickly accumulates supporting his view that once more the show’s credibility and the viewer’s patience are tested. At its best, the series evokes memories of the adaptation some years back of Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, through its portrayal of the competing allures and fears offered by rational thought and religion. At its worst, it resembles a bear-themed police procedural. Still, it does seem to offer the answer to the earlier query: “Females, choose the animal.”

• To Cook a Bear streams on Disney+ now.