🔗 Share this article

A intense debate recently went viral on social media, after someone posed the question for females: would you rather find yourself stranded in the woods alongside a male or a bear? Like all the most engaging hypothetical scenarios, it revealed wildly different perspectives and life encounters, highlighted chasms between the sexes, and could easily cause an existential crisis if you thought about it for too long. Additionally, there came the predictable coda where some males took to the internet to tell females how foolish they had been to select the bear and went on to describe the punishments they deserved for that choice. This at least enabled the women who were uncertain about their decision to decide with a new confidence.

Dramatising the Setup

To Cook a Bear effectively brings to life this nifty small premise. This six-episode series is based on Scandinavian writer the novelist’s 2018 novel of the same name (rendered in 2020 for an English audience). It follows the tribulations of a pastor (the lead actor) and his family when they arrive to start a new ministry within Kengis, a remote settlement in Sweden’s north, in 1852. In a place lacking many joys, none of the inhabitants especially appreciate his strict stance on drinking and revelry, yet it is his defense of impoverished people – particularly the native Sami population, from among whom comes the pastor’s adopted son the youth Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in societal fairness and equal rights that places him in direct opposition against the Kengis powers that be.

The Antagonists

Soon in cahoots against him include the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the fearsome factory proprietor the matron Sjödahl (the actress), seen initially firing a newly injured laborer with minimal compensation as he remains gibbering upon seeing of his pulped hand, and all others who profit from a community who can be bought with some containers of the whisky provided by the unsettling store owner Lindmark (the actor). However, in fairness, Lindmark’s eeriness pales once itinerant painter the artist Beronius appears on the scene (Simon J Berger, providing an acting turn of rare discomfiting power). If they are – similar to the clergyman – only a little more than caricatures, they still serve as effective ones.

Narrative Development

With the seeds of conflict sown, it is time to proceed with the storyline. The maid from the doctor’s house, Hilda (the actress), accordingly vanishes in the forest. Signs of her flight and bear markings on a tree get discovered yet she remains completely absent. Gossip and fears regarding a human-devouring bear roaming the woodland spread, but the pastor has another theory that he and Jussi set out to verify.

An Odd Beast

This Bear Drama is a somewhat odd beast. It conjures a fine sense of the desolation that lets suspicion and bias and dark myths flourish based on local folklore that animals can be controlled or inhabited by the spirits of men. And it doesn’t idealising the hardscrabble life led by the villagers, in which brutality, whether that of the wild or people, always looms at the periphery, poised to explode. Yet the personas seldom evolve beyond symbols – or perhaps, as the struggles amid fairness and revenge, rationality and faith, good and wickedness escalate, representative characters in a fable – preventing the whole thing fully coming to life.

Stylistic Shifts

Additionally, exist the many tonally jarring instances in which the pastor’s ability in finding evidence and discern Hilda’s fate becomes almost risible. He positions himself looking at shattered containers and strands of fur in hay barns like a combined the Belgian detective and Sherlock Holmes – alongside Jussi a rather hapless Hastings-cum-Watson (none of whom were required to lick a blend of blood droplets and the boss’s spit to agree that indeed, it was clearly dried blood at the crime scene), before announcing his newest conclusion and extracting a body from a bog.

Clashing Agendas

The village elite are determined demonstrating that Hilda was killed by an animal, maybe to protect the peace, perhaps to shield a fellow elite. The pastor is intent on proving otherwise, and the evidence so rapidly accumulates in his favour that once more the show’s credibility and the viewer’s patience get strained. At its best, To Cook a Bear is reminiscent of the TV version some years back of Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the opposing allures and terrors offered by rational thought and religion. In its low points, it resembles a bear-themed police procedural. Still, it does seem to offer the response to the earlier query: “Ladies, take the bear.”

• The series streams on Disney+ now.