🔗 Share this article

An heated debate recently spread widely on social media, following a user asked the question for females: which would you prefer find yourself stranded in a forest alongside a male or a bear? Like all the best hypothetical scenarios, it exposed wildly different perspectives and life encounters, illuminated chasms between the sexes, and could easily cause a deep personal dilemma if you thought on it for too long. There was also the predictable coda in which some males took to the internet to tell women how stupid they were to select the bear and went on to describe the consequences they deserved for that choice. This at minimum enabled those females who had been hesitating about their decision to decide with a new confidence.

Dramatising the Setup

To Cook a Bear skillfully dramatises this clever small premise. This six-episode drama is adapted on Scandinavian writer the novelist’s 2018 book with the identical title (translated in 2020 for an English audience). It follows the struggles of a pastor (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his household when they arrive to begin a fresh religious post within Kengis, an isolated settlement in northern Sweden, during the mid-19th century. Within a community with few pleasures, none of the inhabitants particularly appreciate his strict stance on alcohol and dancing, yet it is his defense of the poor – especially the native Sami population, from among whom comes the preacher’s foster child the youth Jussi (the young actor) – and his belief in social justice and equal rights that sets him on a collision course with the Kengis powers that be.

The Antagonists

Quickly in cahoots against him are the lawman Brahe (the performer), the fearsome factory proprietor the matron Sjödahl (Pernilla August), observed initially firing a recently mangled worker with minimal compensation as he remains gibbering upon seeing of his pulped hand, and anyone else who profit from a community who can be bought for a few bottles of the whisky provided by the creepy shopkeeper Lindmark (the actor). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s creepiness diminishes once itinerant painter Beronius appears in the story (the performer, providing an acting turn of rare unsettling intensity). While they remain – like the pastor himself – just slightly beyond than caricatures, they still serve as effective ones.

Plot Progression

With the seeds of tension planted, the moment arrives to proceed to narrative business. The servant from the doctor’s house, the character Hilda (the actress), accordingly goes missing from the woods. Signs of her flight and animal scratches on a tree are found but she is completely absent. Gossip and anxieties regarding a human-devouring beast roaming the woods circulate, yet the clergyman has another theory that he and Jussi embark to prove.

An Odd Beast

This Bear Drama is a slightly odd beast. It creates a strong impression of the bleakness that allows distrust and bias and dark myths flourish based on local folklore that animals might be dominated or inhabited by the souls of humans. And it doesn’t idealising the hardscrabble life experienced by the villagers, in which violence, whether that of nature or mankind, always looms on the edges, poised to explode. Yet the personas rarely become more than ciphers – or maybe, as the struggles amid fairness and vengeance, rationality and religion, virtue and wickedness intensify, representative characters within a moral tale – preventing the entire production truly coming to life.

Stylistic Shifts

Additionally, exist numerous stylistically clashing instances in which the pastor’s ability in finding evidence and determine Hilda’s fate turns nearly laughable. He stands looking at shattered containers and strands of fur in hay barns as a fusion of the Belgian detective the English sleuth – with Jussi a particularly unfortunate assistant figure (none of whom had to taste a blend of blood droplets and the boss’s spit to agree that, yes, it was definitely coagulated blood on the site), before announcing his newest conclusion and pulling a body out of a swamp.

Opposing Goals

The local leaders are bent on proving that the maid was killed by a bear, perhaps to preserve the calm, or possibly to shield a fellow elite. The clergyman is intent on proving the opposite, and the proof so quickly stacks up in his favour that once more the show’s credibility and the viewer’s patience are tested. At its best, the series evokes memories of the adaptation some years back of Sarah Perry’s the serpent tale, with its evocation of the opposing allures and fears presented by science and religion. At its worst, it’s more like a bear-themed police procedural. Nevertheless, it appears to offer the response to that debated question: “Females, choose the animal.”

• To Cook a Bear is on Disney+ currently.