🔗 Share this article

A intense debate recently spread widely across online platforms, after a user asked a query for females: would you rather be lost in the woods with a man or with a bear? Like all the most engaging thought experiments, it revealed wildly different perspectives and life encounters, highlighted divides between the sexes, and could easily to induce a deep personal dilemma for anyone pondering about it extensively. Additionally, there came the almost inevitable follow-up in which men of a certain stripe took to the internet to inform females how foolish they had been to select the bear and proceeded to limn the consequences they deserved for that choice. This at least enabled those females who had been hesitating over their choice to make it with renewed assurance.

Dramatising the Scenario

To Cook a Bear skillfully brings to life this clever little setup. This six-episode series is adapted on Swedish author the novelist’s 2018 book with the identical title (rendered in 2020 for English readers). It follows the tribulations of a pastor (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his household when they arrive to start a new ministry within Kengis, a remote village in northern Sweden, in 1852. In a place lacking many joys, none of the locals especially warm to his strict stance on alcohol and revelry, but it is his protection of the poor – particularly the native Sami population, from which comes the preacher’s foster child Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in societal fairness and equality that sets him in direct opposition with the Kengis local authorities.

The Antagonists

Soon in cahoots opposing him include the lawman Brahe (the performer), the intimidating factory proprietor the matron Sjödahl (the actress), observed 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 profit from a populace easily swayed with some containers of the whisky provided by the unsettling shopkeeper the merchant Lindmark (the actor). Although, to be fair, Lindmark’s creepiness pales when itinerant painter the artist Beronius arrives in the story (the performer, providing a performance of exceptional unsettling intensity). If they are – similar to the clergyman – just slightly beyond than caricatures, they are at least effective ones.

Narrative Development

Once the foundations of tension sown, the moment arrives to get down to narrative business. The servant from the doctor’s house, Hilda (the actress), accordingly goes missing in the forest. Signs of her escape and animal scratches upon a trunk are found but she is nowhere to be seen. Gossip and fears regarding a human-devouring beast prowling the woodland circulate, but the pastor has another theory which he and his ward set out to prove.

A Strange Creation

This Bear Drama is a slightly odd beast. It conjures a fine sense of the desolation that lets distrust and prejudice and grim legends flourish from the native legend that bears might be dominated or possessed by the souls of humans. And it doesn’t romanticise the tough existence led by the villagers, in which violence, be it from the wild or mankind, lurks constantly on the edges, waiting to erupt. But the characters rarely become beyond symbols – or maybe, while the conflicts amid fairness and revenge, logic and religion, good and wickedness intensify, emblematic figures in a fable – which stops the entire production fully coming to life.

Stylistic Shifts

Additionally, there are the many stylistically clashing moments where the pastor’s ability in finding evidence and discern Hilda’s fate becomes nearly laughable. He positions himself looking at shattered containers and clumps of hair within storage sheds like a combined Hercule Poirot and Sherlock Holmes – with Jussi a particularly unfortunate assistant figure (neither of whom had to lick a blend of blood droplets and saliva from his superior to confirm that indeed, it was definitely coagulated blood at the crime scene), before announcing his latest deduction and pulling a corpse from a bog.

Clashing Agendas

The village elite are determined proving that Hilda was killed by a bear, maybe to preserve the peace, or possibly to shield a fellow elite. The pastor is bent on establishing the opposite, and the proof so rapidly stacks up in his favour that once more 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 attractions and fears offered by science and religion. At its worst, it’s more like Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Nevertheless, it appears to provide the answer to the earlier query: “Ladies, take the bear.”

• To Cook a Bear streams on Disney+ currently.