🔗 Share this article

A intense discussion recently spread widely on social media, following a user posed the question for females: which would you prefer be lost in the woods alongside a male or a bear? Similar to the best thought experiments, it revealed wildly different perspectives and life encounters, illuminated chasms between the sexes, and was likely to induce an existential crisis if you thought on it for too long. Additionally, there came the almost inevitable coda in which some males took to the internet to inform women how stupid they had been for choosing the bear and went on to limn the consequences they merited for it. This at least allowed those females who had been hesitating about their decision to make it with renewed assurance.

Portraying the Scenario

The Bear-Cooking Tale skillfully dramatises this nifty small premise. The six-part series is based from Scandinavian writer the novelist’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 northern Sweden, in 1852. Within a community lacking many joys, not one of the inhabitants particularly appreciate his strict stance on alcohol and revelry, yet it is his protection of the poor – especially the indigenous Sami, from among whom comes the preacher’s adopted son Jussi (the young actor) – and his conviction in social justice and equality that places him on a collision course against the Kengis powers that be.

The Antagonists

Quickly in cahoots opposing him include the lawman the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the intimidating factory proprietor Madam Sjödahl (the actress), seen initially dismissing 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 populace easily swayed for a few bottles of the whisky provided by the unsettling shopkeeper the merchant Lindmark (the actor). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s eeriness diminishes when itinerant painter Beronius appears in the story (the performer, delivering an acting turn of exceptional unsettling intensity). If they are – like the pastor himself – only a little more than caricatures, they still serve as potent archetypes.

Narrative Development

Once the foundations of tension planted, the moment arrives to get down with the storyline. The maid from the doctor’s house, the character Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), duly vanishes from the woods. Signs of her flight and bear markings on a tree are found yet she remains completely absent. Gossip and fears regarding a human-devouring bear prowling the woods circulate, yet the clergyman holds a different view which he and his ward set out to prove.

An Odd Beast

To Cook a Bear is a slightly peculiar show. It creates a fine sense of the bleakness that allows suspicion and prejudice and dark myths flourish from the native legend that animals can be controlled or possessed by the spirits of humans. It avoids idealising the hardscrabble life experienced by the villagers, in which violence, be it from the wild or mankind, lurks constantly at the periphery, poised to explode. Yet the personas seldom evolve beyond symbols – or perhaps, as the struggles between justice and revenge, logic and faith, good and wickedness intensify, emblematic figures within a moral tale – preventing the whole thing fully coming to life.

Stylistic Shifts

And then, exist the many stylistically clashing instances in which the pastor’s ability to discover clues and discern Hilda’s fate turns almost risible. He positions himself observing shattered containers and strands of fur in hay barns as a fusion of the Belgian detective and Sherlock Holmes – with Jussi a particularly unfortunate Hastings-cum-Watson (none of whom were required to taste a blend of blood droplets and saliva from his superior to agree that indeed, it was definitely coagulated blood at the crime scene), before announcing his newest conclusion and pulling a body out of a swamp.

Clashing Agendas

The local leaders are bent on proving that the maid was killed by an animal, maybe to preserve the peace, perhaps to protect a fellow elite. The clergyman is bent on establishing the opposite, and the evidence so rapidly stacks up in his favour that again the show’s credibility and the viewer’s patience get strained. In its finest moments, To Cook a Bear evokes memories of the adaptation some years back of the author’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the competing allures and fears offered by rational thought and religion. At its worst, it resembles a bear-themed police procedural. Still, it appears to provide the response to the earlier query: “Females, choose the animal.”

• To Cook a Bear streams on Disney+ currently.