🔗 Share this article

A intense discussion recently went viral across online platforms, after a user asked the question to women: would you rather be lost in a forest alongside a male or with a bear? Similar to the most engaging thought experiments, it revealed wildly different perspectives and life encounters, highlighted divides between the sexes, and was likely to induce an existential crisis if you thought on it for too long. Additionally, there came the predictable coda where men of a certain stripe came online to inform females how stupid they had been for choosing the animal and proceeded to limn the punishments they merited for that choice. This at minimum allowed those females who had been hesitating over their choice to decide with renewed assurance.

Portraying the Scenario

To Cook a Bear effectively dramatises this nifty small premise. The six-part series is adapted on Scandinavian writer Mikael Niemi’s 2018 book of the same name (rendered two years later for an English audience). It traces the tribulations of a clergyman (the lead actor) and his household as they come to begin a fresh religious post within Kengis, an isolated settlement in Sweden’s north, during the mid-19th century. In a place lacking many joys, not one of the inhabitants particularly warm to his puritanical stance on alcohol and revelry, yet it is his protection of the poor – particularly the indigenous Sami, from among whom hails the preacher’s foster child Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in societal fairness and equality that places him in direct opposition against the Kengis local authorities.

The Opposing Forces

Soon collaborating opposing him are the sheriff the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the intimidating mill owner Madam Sjödahl (Pernilla August), observed initially dismissing a newly injured worker with a month’s pay as he remains gibbering upon seeing his crushed hand, and all others who benefit from a community who can be bought with some containers of liquor provided by the creepy shopkeeper the merchant Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s creepiness pales when itinerant painter the artist Beronius appears in the story (the performer, delivering a performance of exceptional unsettling intensity). While they remain – like the pastor himself – only a little more being stereotypes, they still serve as potent archetypes.

Plot Progression

With the seeds of conflict planted, it is time to get down to narrative business. The servant from the doctor’s house, Hilda (the actress), accordingly vanishes in the forest. Signs of her flight and bear markings upon a trunk get discovered yet she remains completely absent. Gossip and fears of a man/maid-eating beast prowling the woods circulate, but the pastor holds a different view that he and Jussi set out to verify.

A Strange Creation

This Bear Drama is a somewhat peculiar show. It creates a fine sense of the desolation that lets suspicion and bias and dark myths thrive from the native legend that bears might be dominated or inhabited by the souls of humans. It avoids romanticise the hardscrabble life led by the villagers, in which violence, whether that of nature or people, always looms at the periphery, poised to explode. But the characters seldom evolve more than ciphers – or maybe, while the conflicts between justice and revenge, rationality and religion, virtue and evil intensify, emblematic figures in a fable – preventing the entire production truly becoming immersive.

Tonal Inconsistencies

Additionally, exist the many stylistically clashing instances in which the pastor’s ability in finding evidence and discern Hilda’s fate becomes nearly laughable. He stands observing broken milk pots and clumps of hair within storage sheds as a fusion of Hercule Poirot the English sleuth – with Jussi a particularly unfortunate assistant figure (neither of whom had to taste a mixture of blood droplets and the boss’s spit to confirm that, yes, it was definitely coagulated blood at the crime scene), prior to declaring his newest conclusion and extracting a body out of a swamp.

Clashing Agendas

The village elite are determined demonstrating that the maid was killed by a bear, perhaps to preserve the peace, or possibly to shield a fellow elite. The pastor is intent on establishing the opposite, and the evidence so quickly accumulates in his favour that again the show’s credibility and the viewer’s patience are tested. In its finest moments, the series is reminiscent of the adaptation some years back of the author’s the serpent tale, with its evocation of the competing allures and fears offered by rational thought and belief. At its worst, it resembles Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Nevertheless, it appears to offer the answer to the earlier query: “Females, choose the animal.”

• The series streams on Disney+ currently.