🔗 Share this article

An intense discussion lately went viral on social media, after a user asked a query to women: would you rather find yourself stranded in the woods alongside a male or with a bear? Like all the best thought experiments, it exposed wildly different perspectives and experiences, illuminated divides among genders, and could easily cause a deep personal dilemma if you thought on it for too long. Additionally, there came the predictable coda in which some males came online to inform females how stupid they were to select the animal and proceeded to limn the consequences they deserved for it. This at minimum enabled the women who had been hesitating about their decision to make it with renewed assurance.

Portraying the Setup

The Bear-Cooking Tale skillfully brings to life this clever small premise. The six-part drama is based on Swedish author the novelist’s 2018 book with the identical title (rendered in 2020 for English readers). It follows the tribulations of a clergyman (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his household when they arrive to start a fresh religious post within Kengis, an isolated village in Sweden’s north, in 1852. Within a community lacking many joys, not one of the inhabitants particularly appreciate his strict stance on alcohol and dancing, yet it is his protection of the poor – especially the indigenous Sami, from which 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 against the Kengis powers that be.

The Antagonists

Soon collaborating against him are the sheriff the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the intimidating mill owner the matron Sjödahl (the actress), observed initially firing a recently mangled laborer with a month’s pay as he remains babbling at the sight of his pulped hand, and anyone else who profit from a populace who can be bought for a few bottles of liquor sold by the unsettling shopkeeper Lindmark (the actor). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s creepiness pales when travelling artist Beronius appears on the scene (the performer, delivering an acting turn of rare unsettling intensity). While they remain – like the pastor himself – just slightly beyond than caricatures, they still serve as potent archetypes.

Plot Progression

Once the foundations of conflict sown, it is time to proceed to narrative business. The maid from the doctor’s house, the character Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), duly vanishes from the woods. Signs of her escape and animal scratches upon a trunk are found but she is completely absent. Gossip and anxieties of a man/maid-eating beast roaming the woodland circulate, but the pastor holds a different view 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 bleakness that lets suspicion and bias and grim legends thrive from the native legend that animals might be dominated or possessed by the spirits of men. It avoids romanticise the hardscrabble life experienced by the villagers, where violence, whether that of the wild or mankind, always looms on the edges, waiting to erupt. Yet the personas rarely become more than ciphers – or perhaps, while the conflicts amid fairness and vengeance, logic and religion, virtue and evil intensify, emblematic figures in a fable – which stops the entire production truly coming to life.

Stylistic Shifts

And then, there are the many stylistically clashing instances where the pastor’s ability to discover clues and determine Hilda’s fate turns almost risible. He positions himself observing broken milk pots and clumps of hair within storage sheds as a fusion of Hercule Poirot and Sherlock Holmes – alongside Jussi a rather hapless Hastings-cum-Watson (neither of whom had to taste a blend of blood spatter and the boss’s spit to confirm that, yes, it was clearly coagulated blood on the site), prior to declaring his latest deduction and extracting a body out of a swamp.

Clashing Agendas

The local leaders are bent on demonstrating that the maid was killed by an animal, maybe to preserve the calm, perhaps to shield a fellow elite. The pastor is intent on proving the opposite, and the evidence so quickly stacks up supporting his view that once more the drama’s plausibility and the viewer’s patience are tested. At its best, To Cook a Bear is reminiscent of the TV version some years back of Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the competing allures and terrors offered by rational thought and religion. In its low points, it resembles Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Still, it does seem to offer the answer to the earlier query: “Females, choose the animal.”

• The series is on Disney+ currently.