🔗 Share this article

A heated debate recently spread widely on social media, after a user posed the question for females: which would you prefer be lost in a forest with a man or a bear? Like all the best hypothetical scenarios, it exposed vastly opposing perspectives and life encounters, illuminated divides among genders, and was likely to induce an existential crisis for anyone pondering on it extensively. Additionally, there came the almost inevitable coda in which some males came online to tell females how foolish they were for choosing the bear and went on to describe the consequences they merited for that choice. This at least enabled those females who were uncertain over their choice to decide with a new confidence.

Portraying the Setup

To Cook a Bear effectively dramatises this clever small premise. The six-part series is based on Swedish author the novelist’s 2018 book of the same name (rendered in 2020 for an English audience). It follows the tribulations of a clergyman (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his family when they arrive to begin a fresh religious post in Kengis, an isolated village in Sweden’s north, in 1852. Within a community lacking many joys, not one of the inhabitants particularly warm to his puritanical approach to drinking and revelry, yet it is his defense of impoverished people – especially the native Sami population, from among whom hails the pastor’s adopted son the youth 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 Opposing Forces

Quickly in cahoots against him are the lawman Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the intimidating mill owner Madam Sjödahl (the actress), observed initially firing a newly injured worker with minimal compensation while he is still gibbering upon seeing his crushed hand, and anyone else who benefit from a community who can be bought with some containers of liquor provided by the creepy shopkeeper the merchant Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). Although, in fairness, Lindmark’s eeriness diminishes when itinerant painter the artist Beronius arrives on the scene (Simon J Berger, delivering a performance of exceptional unsettling intensity). If they are – similar to the clergyman – just slightly beyond being stereotypes, they still serve as effective ones.

Narrative Development

Once the foundations of conflict planted, it is time to get down with the storyline. The servant from the doctor’s house, Hilda (the actress), duly goes missing from the woods. Indications of her flight and bear markings upon a trunk are found but she is nowhere to be seen. Rumours and fears of a man/maid-eating bear roaming the woods circulate, yet the clergyman has another theory which he and his ward set out to prove.

An Odd Beast

This Bear Drama is a somewhat peculiar show. It creates a strong impression of the desolation that lets suspicion and bias and dark myths thrive based on local folklore that animals can be controlled or possessed by the souls of humans. It avoids idealising the hardscrabble life led by the villagers, where violence, whether that of nature or mankind, lurks constantly at the periphery, poised to explode. Yet the personas rarely become beyond symbols – or perhaps, while the conflicts between justice and vengeance, rationality and faith, virtue and evil intensify, emblematic figures in a fable – which stops the whole thing fully becoming immersive.

Tonal Inconsistencies

And then, there are numerous tonally jarring moments in which the clergyman’s skill in finding evidence and determine Hilda’s fate turns nearly laughable. He stands observing shattered containers and clumps of hair in hay barns as a fusion of Hercule Poirot and Sherlock Holmes – alongside Jussi a rather hapless assistant figure (neither of whom had to taste a mixture of blood droplets and the boss’s spit to agree that indeed, it was definitely coagulated blood on the site), prior to declaring his newest conclusion and extracting a corpse from a bog.

Opposing Goals

The village elite are determined proving that Hilda met her end by an animal, maybe to protect the peace, perhaps to protect one of their own. The clergyman is intent on establishing otherwise, and the evidence so quickly accumulates supporting his view that again the drama’s plausibility and audience tolerance are tested. In its finest moments, the series is reminiscent of the TV version some years back of Sarah Perry’s the serpent tale, with its evocation of the competing allures and terrors offered by rational thought and religion. At its worst, it resembles Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Nevertheless, it does seem to offer the response to that debated question: “Ladies, take the bear.”

• The series streams on Disney+ currently.