🔗 Share this article

An heated discussion recently spread widely across online platforms, after a user asked a query to women: would you rather be lost in a forest with a man or a bear? Similar to the most engaging thought experiments, it exposed vastly opposing perspectives and life encounters, illuminated chasms among genders, and was likely cause a deep personal dilemma for anyone pondering on it for too long. Additionally, there came the almost inevitable follow-up in which some males took to the internet to tell females how foolish they had been to select the animal and went on to describe the consequences they merited for that choice. This at least enabled the women who were uncertain over their choice to decide with a new confidence.

Portraying the Setup

To Cook a Bear skillfully dramatises this nifty small premise. The six-part drama is based from Scandinavian writer Mikael Niemi’s 2018 novel with the identical title (rendered two years later for English readers). It traces the struggles of a clergyman (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his household when they arrive to begin a new ministry within Kengis, an isolated settlement in northern Sweden, in 1852. In a place with few pleasures, none of the inhabitants especially warm to his strict approach to alcohol and revelry, yet it is his protection of impoverished people – particularly the native Sami population, from among whom hails the preacher’s foster child the youth Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in social justice and equal rights that places him on a collision course with the Kengis local authorities.

The Opposing Forces

Soon in cahoots opposing him include the lawman Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the intimidating mill owner the matron Sjödahl (the actress), seen 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 easily swayed for a few bottles of the whisky provided by the creepy store owner Lindmark (the actor). Although, in fairness, Lindmark’s eeriness diminishes once travelling artist 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 being stereotypes, they still serve as effective ones.

Plot Progression

Once the foundations of tension sown, it is time to proceed to narrative business. The servant from the doctor’s house, the character Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), duly goes missing from the woods. Indications of her escape and animal scratches upon a trunk are found but she is nowhere to be seen. Rumours and anxieties regarding a human-devouring beast prowling the woodland circulate, but the pastor has another theory that he and Jussi set out to verify.

An Odd Beast

This Bear Drama is a slightly peculiar show. It creates a strong impression of the desolation that lets suspicion and prejudice and grim legends flourish from the native legend that bears might be dominated or possessed by the souls of humans. It avoids romanticise the tough existence led by the villagers, where brutality, whether that of nature or mankind, lurks constantly at the periphery, poised to explode. Yet the personas rarely become more than ciphers – or maybe, while the conflicts between justice and revenge, rationality and faith, good and wickedness escalate, representative characters within a moral tale – which stops the whole thing fully becoming immersive.

Stylistic Shifts

Additionally, there are the many stylistically clashing instances in which the pastor’s ability to discover clues and discern Hilda’s fate turns nearly laughable. He stands looking at shattered containers and strands of fur in hay barns like a combined the Belgian detective the English sleuth – alongside Jussi a particularly unfortunate Hastings-cum-Watson (neither of whom were required to taste a mixture of blood spatter and the boss’s spit to agree that indeed, it was definitely dried blood on the site), prior to declaring his latest deduction and extracting a corpse out of a swamp.

Clashing Agendas

The village elite are determined demonstrating that the maid met her end by a bear, perhaps to preserve the calm, or possibly to shield a fellow elite. The clergyman is bent on establishing the opposite, and the evidence so quickly accumulates in his favour that again the drama’s plausibility and the viewer’s patience get strained. At its best, the series evokes memories of the TV version some years back of Sarah Perry’s the serpent tale, through its portrayal of the opposing allures and fears offered by rational thought and religion. In its low points, it’s more like a bear-themed police procedural. Still, it does seem to offer the answer to the earlier query: “Ladies, take the bear.”

• To Cook a Bear streams on Disney+ now.