🔗 Share this article

An heated debate lately went viral across online platforms, after a user posed a query 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 exposed vastly opposing perspectives and life encounters, highlighted chasms among genders, and was likely to induce a deep personal dilemma for anyone pondering on it for too long. Additionally, there came the almost inevitable coda where men of a certain stripe came online to inform females how foolish they had been to select the animal and went on to limn the consequences they deserved for that choice. This at minimum 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 nifty little setup. The six-part series is based from Swedish author Mikael Niemi’s 2018 novel of the same name (translated two years later for English readers). It follows the struggles of a pastor (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his household when they arrive to begin a new ministry within Kengis, an isolated village in Sweden’s north, during the mid-19th century. Within a community lacking many joys, not one of the locals especially warm to his strict approach to drinking and revelry, yet it is his defense of impoverished people – especially the native Sami population, from which hails the pastor’s foster child the youth Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in social justice and equal rights that sets him in direct opposition with the Kengis local authorities.

The Antagonists

Soon in cahoots opposing him are the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the fearsome factory proprietor the matron Sjödahl (the actress), seen early on firing a recently mangled laborer with minimal compensation while he is still babbling at the sight his crushed hand, and all others who benefit from a community who can be bought for a few bottles of the whisky provided by the creepy shopkeeper the merchant Lindmark (the actor). Although, in fairness, Lindmark’s creepiness diminishes once travelling artist the artist Beronius appears in the story (Simon J Berger, providing an acting turn of rare unsettling intensity). If they are – like the pastor himself – only a little more than caricatures, they are at least potent archetypes.

Plot Progression

Once the foundations of conflict planted, it is time to get down to narrative business. The servant employed by the doctor, Hilda (the actress), duly vanishes from the woods. Indications of her escape and animal scratches on a tree are found but she is completely absent. Gossip and fears regarding a human-devouring bear prowling the woodland spread, yet the clergyman has another theory that he and Jussi set out to verify.

A Strange Creation

This Bear Drama is a slightly peculiar show. It conjures a fine sense of the bleakness that lets suspicion and bias and dark myths flourish from the native legend that bears can be controlled or inhabited by the spirits of humans. It avoids romanticise the tough existence led by the residents, in which brutality, be it from the wild or mankind, always looms on the edges, waiting to erupt. But the characters seldom evolve more than ciphers – or maybe, as the struggles amid fairness and vengeance, logic and faith, good and evil intensify, emblematic figures in a fable – which stops the entire production fully coming to life.

Tonal Inconsistencies

Additionally, there are numerous stylistically clashing instances in which the clergyman’s skill to discover clues and discern Hilda’s fate turns nearly laughable. He stands observing shattered containers and clumps of hair in hay barns as a fusion of Hercule Poirot and Sherlock Holmes – with Jussi a particularly unfortunate assistant figure (neither of whom had to taste a mixture of blood droplets and saliva from his superior to confirm that indeed, it was definitely coagulated blood on the site), before announcing his latest deduction and extracting a body out of a swamp.

Opposing Goals

The village elite are bent on proving that Hilda was killed by an animal, perhaps to preserve the peace, perhaps to protect one of their own. The clergyman is intent on proving otherwise, and the evidence so rapidly accumulates supporting his view that once more the show’s credibility and audience tolerance get strained. At its best, To Cook a Bear evokes memories of the adaptation a few years ago of Sarah Perry’s the serpent tale, with its evocation of the competing allures and terrors presented by science and belief. At its worst, it’s more like Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Nevertheless, it appears to offer the answer to that debated question: “Females, choose the animal.”

• To Cook a Bear streams on Disney+ currently.