🔗 Share this article

An heated discussion recently went viral across online platforms, after someone posed the question to women: which would you prefer be lost in a forest with a man or with a bear? Like all the best thought experiments, it revealed wildly different worldviews and experiences, illuminated chasms among genders, and was likely to induce an existential crisis for anyone pondering on it for too long. There was also the almost inevitable coda in which some males came online to inform women how foolish they had been to select the animal and proceeded to describe the punishments they merited for that choice. This at minimum enabled those females who were uncertain over their choice to decide with a new confidence.

Dramatising the Scenario

The Bear-Cooking Tale skillfully dramatises this nifty little setup. The six-part drama is adapted from Swedish author the novelist’s 2018 novel of the same name (rendered in 2020 for English readers). It follows the tribulations of a clergyman (the lead actor) and his household as they come to begin a new ministry within Kengis, a remote village in Sweden’s north, in 1852. Within a community lacking many joys, none of the locals particularly warm to his strict approach to alcohol and dancing, but it is his protection of the poor – especially the indigenous Sami, from among whom hails the pastor’s foster child the youth Jussi (the young actor) – and his belief in societal fairness and equality that places him on a collision course with the Kengis powers that be.

The Opposing Forces

Quickly in cahoots against him are the lawman the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the fearsome factory proprietor the matron Sjödahl (the actress), observed initially dismissing a newly injured laborer with a month’s pay while he is still babbling upon seeing of his pulped hand, and anyone else who profit from a populace who can be bought with some containers of the whisky provided by the creepy shopkeeper the merchant Lindmark (the actor). Although, in fairness, Lindmark’s creepiness diminishes once itinerant painter the artist Beronius appears in the story (the performer, providing an acting turn of exceptional discomfiting power). While they remain – like the pastor himself – only a little more being stereotypes, they still serve as potent archetypes.

Narrative Development

Once the foundations of conflict sown, it is time to proceed with the storyline. The maid from the doctor’s house, Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), duly vanishes in the forest. Indications of her flight and animal scratches on a tree get discovered but she is nowhere to be seen. Gossip and anxieties regarding a human-devouring beast prowling the woods circulate, but the pastor has another theory which he and his ward embark to verify.

A Strange Creation

To Cook a Bear is a somewhat peculiar show. It creates a fine sense of the desolation that lets distrust and prejudice and dark myths thrive from the native legend that bears might be dominated or possessed by the spirits of men. It avoids idealising the hardscrabble life led by the villagers, in which brutality, whether that of nature or people, lurks constantly on the edges, waiting to erupt. But the characters rarely become beyond symbols – or maybe, as the struggles between justice and vengeance, rationality and religion, virtue and evil escalate, representative characters within a moral tale – which stops the whole thing truly coming to life.

Tonal Inconsistencies

Additionally, exist numerous tonally jarring instances where the clergyman’s skill in finding evidence and discern Hilda’s fate becomes almost risible. He positions himself observing broken milk pots and strands of fur in hay barns as a fusion of Hercule Poirot the English sleuth – alongside Jussi a particularly unfortunate assistant figure (none of whom were required to taste a blend of blood spatter and the boss’s spit to agree that indeed, it was definitely coagulated blood on the site), before announcing his newest conclusion and pulling a body from a bog.

Clashing Agendas

The local leaders are bent on proving that Hilda was killed by a bear, perhaps to protect the peace, or possibly to protect one of their own. The clergyman is bent on proving otherwise, and the evidence so rapidly accumulates in his favour that again the drama’s plausibility and audience tolerance get strained. At its best, To Cook a Bear is reminiscent of the TV version some years back of Sarah Perry’s the serpent tale, with its evocation of the opposing allures and terrors presented by science and religion. In its low points, it resembles a bear-themed police procedural. Still, it appears to provide the response to the earlier query: “Ladies, take the bear.”

• The series is on Disney+ currently.