🔗 Share this article

An heated discussion lately spread widely on social media, after a user posed the question to women: which would you prefer find yourself stranded in the woods alongside a male or a bear? Like all the most engaging thought experiments, it revealed wildly different worldviews and experiences, highlighted divides between the sexes, and could easily to induce an existential crisis for anyone pondering about it extensively. There was also the predictable follow-up in which some males came online to tell females how foolish they were for choosing the bear and went on to limn the punishments they merited for that choice. This at minimum allowed the women who had been hesitating over their choice to make it with renewed assurance.

Dramatising the Setup

The Bear-Cooking Tale effectively dramatises this clever little setup. This six-episode series is based from Scandinavian writer Mikael Niemi’s 2018 novel with the identical title (translated in 2020 for an English audience). It traces the struggles of a pastor (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his household as they come to start a fresh religious post in Kengis, a remote settlement in Sweden’s north, in 1852. Within a community with few pleasures, not one of the inhabitants especially warm to his strict stance on alcohol and dancing, but it is his protection of the poor – especially the native Sami population, from among whom hails the pastor’s foster child Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in social justice and equal rights that places him in direct opposition against the Kengis local authorities.

The Antagonists

Quickly in cahoots opposing him include the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the intimidating mill owner Madam Sjödahl (Pernilla August), seen early on firing a newly injured worker with a month’s pay as he remains gibbering at the sight of his pulped hand, and all others who benefit from a community easily swayed for a few bottles of the whisky provided by the unsettling store owner Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s creepiness pales once travelling artist Beronius arrives on the scene (the performer, delivering an acting turn of exceptional discomfiting power). If they are – similar to the clergyman – just slightly beyond than caricatures, they are at least potent archetypes.

Plot Progression

Once the foundations of conflict planted, the moment arrives to proceed to narrative business. The maid from the doctor’s house, the character Hilda (the actress), duly vanishes from the woods. Indications of her flight and bear markings on a tree get discovered yet she remains completely absent. Rumours and anxieties of a man/maid-eating bear prowling the woodland spread, but the pastor has another theory which he and his ward set out to verify.

An Odd Beast

To Cook a Bear is a slightly odd beast. It creates a fine sense of the bleakness that allows distrust and bias and grim legends thrive based on local folklore that bears can be controlled or inhabited by the souls of humans. And it doesn’t romanticise the tough existence experienced by the residents, in which violence, be it from nature or people, always looms on the edges, poised to explode. But the characters seldom evolve more than ciphers – or maybe, as the struggles between justice and revenge, logic and religion, good and evil escalate, representative characters within a moral tale – preventing the whole thing truly becoming immersive.

Tonal Inconsistencies

Additionally, there are numerous tonally jarring instances in which the pastor’s ability to discover clues and determine Hilda’s fate turns almost risible. He positions himself observing broken milk pots and clumps of hair in hay barns like a combined Hercule Poirot the English sleuth – alongside Jussi a particularly unfortunate assistant figure (neither of whom were required to taste a blend of blood droplets and saliva from his superior to confirm that, yes, it was clearly dried blood at the crime scene), prior to declaring his latest deduction and extracting a corpse from a bog.

Opposing Goals

The village elite are determined proving that Hilda was killed by a bear, perhaps to preserve the peace, perhaps to protect one of their own. The clergyman is intent on establishing the opposite, and the evidence so rapidly stacks up supporting his view that again the show’s credibility and audience tolerance are tested. In its finest moments, the series evokes memories of the adaptation a few years ago of the author’s the serpent tale, with its evocation of the competing allures and fears offered by rational thought and belief. In its low points, it’s more like Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Nevertheless, it does seem to offer the answer to that debated question: “Females, choose the animal.”

• To Cook a Bear is on Disney+ currently.