🔗 Share this article

A intense debate lately spread widely across online platforms, following someone posed the question to women: which would you prefer be lost in the woods with a man or with a bear? Similar to the best thought experiments, it revealed wildly different worldviews and life encounters, highlighted divides between the sexes, and could easily cause an existential crisis if you thought on it for too long. There was also the predictable follow-up in which some males came online to inform women how stupid they were to select the animal and went on to limn the consequences they merited for it. This at least allowed the women who had been hesitating about their decision to make it with renewed assurance.

Dramatising the Scenario

The Bear-Cooking Tale effectively brings to life this clever little setup. The six-part drama is adapted on Swedish author the novelist’s 2018 novel of the same name (rendered in 2020 for an English audience). It traces the tribulations of a pastor (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his family as they come to start a fresh religious post within Kengis, a remote village in northern Sweden, in 1852. In a place with few pleasures, none of the inhabitants especially warm to his puritanical stance on drinking and dancing, but it is his defense of the poor – especially the native Sami population, from which comes the preacher’s foster child the youth Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his conviction in societal fairness and equality that places him in direct opposition with the Kengis powers that be.

The Antagonists

Soon in cahoots opposing him are the sheriff the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the fearsome mill owner the matron Sjödahl (the actress), seen initially firing a recently mangled laborer with a month’s pay as he remains gibbering upon seeing his crushed hand, and anyone else who profit from a community easily swayed with some containers of the whisky provided by the unsettling shopkeeper the merchant Lindmark (the actor). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s eeriness pales once itinerant painter the artist Beronius appears in the story (the performer, delivering a performance of rare unsettling intensity). If they are – like the pastor himself – only a little more being stereotypes, they are at least potent archetypes.

Narrative Development

Once the foundations of tension sown, the moment arrives to proceed with the storyline. The maid employed by the doctor, the character Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), accordingly goes missing from the woods. Indications of her escape and bear markings on a tree are found but she is completely absent. Rumours and fears regarding a human-devouring bear prowling the woods spread, yet the clergyman has another theory that he and Jussi embark to verify.

A Strange Creation

This Bear Drama is a slightly odd beast. It conjures a strong impression of the desolation that allows distrust and bias and dark myths thrive from the native legend that animals can be controlled or inhabited by the spirits of men. And it doesn’t romanticise the hardscrabble life experienced by the villagers, where violence, be it from nature or mankind, always looms at the periphery, waiting to erupt. But the characters seldom evolve beyond symbols – or maybe, as the struggles amid fairness and vengeance, rationality and faith, good and evil intensify, representative characters within a moral tale – preventing the whole thing truly becoming immersive.

Stylistic Shifts

And then, there are the many tonally jarring moments in which the clergyman’s skill to discover clues and determine the maid’s destiny becomes almost risible. He positions himself observing shattered containers and clumps of hair within storage sheds as a fusion of Hercule Poirot the English sleuth – alongside Jussi a particularly unfortunate assistant figure (neither of whom had to lick a blend of blood spatter and saliva from his superior to agree that, yes, it was clearly dried blood at the crime scene), before announcing his newest conclusion and pulling a body from a bog.

Opposing Goals

The local leaders are bent on demonstrating that the maid was killed by a bear, perhaps to protect the peace, or possibly to protect a fellow elite. The pastor is bent on establishing the opposite, and the proof so quickly stacks up in his favour that again the show’s credibility and the viewer’s patience are tested. In its finest moments, To Cook a Bear evokes memories of the TV version a few years ago of the author’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the opposing allures and terrors offered by science and belief. In its low points, it’s more like Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Nevertheless, it does seem to offer the answer to that debated question: “Ladies, take the bear.”

• The series is on Disney+ now.