🔗 Share this article

A intense discussion lately spread widely across online platforms, following a user asked the question to women: would you rather find yourself stranded in a forest with a man or a bear? Like all the best thought experiments, it revealed wildly different worldviews and experiences, highlighted chasms among genders, and was likely to induce an existential crisis if you thought about it for too long. Additionally, there came the predictable coda in which some males took to the internet to tell women how stupid they had been for choosing the animal and went on to describe the punishments they deserved for it. This at least enabled the women who were uncertain over their choice to make it with a new confidence.

Portraying the Scenario

The Bear-Cooking Tale effectively brings to life this nifty small premise. The six-part drama is based from Scandinavian writer the novelist’s 2018 book with the identical title (translated in 2020 for English readers). It follows the struggles of a clergyman (the lead actor) and his household when they arrive to start a fresh religious post within Kengis, a remote village in northern Sweden, in 1852. In a place with few pleasures, not one of the inhabitants especially warm to his puritanical stance on drinking and revelry, but it is his protection of the poor – especially the indigenous Sami, from among whom comes the pastor’s adopted son Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his conviction in societal fairness and equality that places him on a collision course against the Kengis local authorities.

The Opposing Forces

Quickly collaborating opposing him include the lawman Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the intimidating factory proprietor Madam Sjödahl (Pernilla August), observed initially firing a newly injured laborer with a month’s pay as he remains gibbering at the sight of his pulped hand, and anyone else who benefit from a community easily swayed for a few bottles of the whisky sold by the creepy shopkeeper Lindmark (the actor). However, in fairness, Lindmark’s creepiness diminishes when travelling artist the artist Beronius arrives in the story (Simon J Berger, delivering a performance of rare discomfiting power). If they are – like the pastor himself – just slightly beyond being stereotypes, they still serve as effective ones.

Plot Progression

With the seeds of tension sown, the moment arrives to proceed with the storyline. The maid employed by the doctor, Hilda (the actress), accordingly goes missing from the woods. Signs of her flight and bear markings upon a trunk are found but she is nowhere to be seen. Gossip and fears of a man/maid-eating beast prowling the woods circulate, but the pastor has another theory that he and Jussi embark to prove.

An Odd Beast

This Bear Drama is a slightly odd beast. It conjures a fine sense of the desolation that allows suspicion and bias and grim legends flourish from the native legend that animals might be dominated or inhabited by the spirits of men. It avoids idealising the hardscrabble life led by the villagers, where brutality, whether that of nature or people, lurks constantly on the edges, poised to explode. Yet the personas seldom evolve beyond symbols – or perhaps, while the conflicts between justice and revenge, logic and faith, good and evil intensify, representative characters within a moral tale – preventing the entire production fully becoming immersive.

Tonal Inconsistencies

Additionally, there are numerous stylistically clashing instances in which the pastor’s ability to discover clues and determine the maid’s destiny becomes almost risible. He stands looking at shattered containers and strands of fur in hay barns as a fusion of Hercule Poirot and Sherlock Holmes – with Jussi a rather hapless Hastings-cum-Watson (neither of whom had to lick a mixture of blood spatter and saliva from his superior to agree that, yes, it was definitely dried blood at the crime scene), before announcing his newest conclusion and pulling a corpse from a bog.

Clashing Agendas

The village elite are bent on proving that Hilda met her end by a bear, maybe to protect the calm, perhaps to shield a fellow elite. The clergyman is bent on establishing the opposite, and the proof so quickly stacks up supporting his view that again the show’s credibility and the viewer’s patience are tested. At its best, To Cook a Bear evokes memories of the adaptation a few years ago of Sarah Perry’s the serpent tale, through its portrayal of the opposing allures and terrors presented by rational thought and belief. At its worst, it’s more like a bear-themed police procedural. Nevertheless, it does seem to offer the answer to the earlier query: “Ladies, take the bear.”

• To Cook a Bear is on Disney+ now.