🔗 Share this article

A intense discussion recently went viral on social media, following someone posed a query for females: would you rather be lost in a forest with a man or with a bear? Like all the best thought experiments, it revealed vastly opposing worldviews and life encounters, illuminated divides among genders, and could easily to induce a deep personal dilemma if you thought on it extensively. Additionally, there came the predictable follow-up in which some males took to the internet to tell females how foolish they had been to select the bear and proceeded to limn the punishments they merited for that choice. This at minimum allowed the women who had been hesitating over their choice to decide with a new confidence.

Dramatising the Scenario

To Cook a Bear effectively dramatises this clever small premise. The six-part drama is adapted on Scandinavian writer Mikael Niemi’s 2018 novel of the same name (translated in 2020 for English readers). It follows the struggles of a clergyman (the lead actor) and his household when they arrive to begin a fresh religious post within Kengis, an isolated settlement in Sweden’s north, in 1852. Within a community with few pleasures, none of the locals especially warm to his puritanical stance on drinking and revelry, but it is his defense of the poor – especially the indigenous Sami, from among whom comes the pastor’s foster child Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his conviction in societal fairness and equality that places him in direct opposition against the Kengis powers that be.

The Antagonists

Quickly collaborating against him are the lawman Brahe (the performer), the fearsome mill owner Madam Sjödahl (Pernilla August), observed initially firing a newly injured laborer with minimal compensation as he remains babbling at the sight his crushed hand, and all others who profit from a populace who can be bought for a few bottles of liquor provided by the unsettling shopkeeper the merchant Lindmark (the actor). However, in fairness, Lindmark’s creepiness pales when itinerant painter the artist Beronius arrives in the story (the performer, delivering an acting turn of exceptional discomfiting power). If they are – similar to the clergyman – only a little more than caricatures, they still serve as potent archetypes.

Plot Progression

Once the foundations of conflict planted, it is time to proceed with the storyline. The maid employed by the doctor, Hilda (the actress), duly goes missing in the forest. Indications of her flight and bear markings upon a trunk are found yet she remains nowhere to be seen. Rumours and anxieties regarding a human-devouring bear prowling the woods circulate, but the pastor holds a different view that he and Jussi set out to verify.

A Strange Creation

To Cook a Bear is a somewhat peculiar show. It creates a fine sense of the bleakness that allows distrust and bias and dark myths thrive from the native legend that bears might be dominated or possessed by the spirits of men. And it doesn’t idealising the hardscrabble life experienced by the villagers, in which violence, be it from the wild or people, always looms at the periphery, poised to explode. Yet the personas rarely become beyond symbols – or perhaps, as the struggles between justice and vengeance, logic and faith, virtue and wickedness escalate, representative characters within a moral tale – preventing the whole thing fully coming to life.

Stylistic Shifts

And then, there are the many stylistically clashing instances in which the clergyman’s skill to discover clues and determine the maid’s destiny turns nearly laughable. He positions himself looking at broken milk pots and clumps of hair in hay barns as a fusion of Hercule Poirot and Sherlock Holmes – with Jussi a particularly unfortunate Hastings-cum-Watson (none of whom were required to taste a blend of blood spatter and saliva from his superior to confirm that indeed, it was definitely coagulated blood at the crime scene), before announcing his newest conclusion and pulling a body from a bog.

Opposing Goals

The village elite are determined proving that the maid was killed by an animal, maybe to preserve the peace, perhaps to shield a fellow elite. The pastor is bent on establishing the opposite, and the proof so quickly accumulates supporting his view that again the drama’s plausibility and audience tolerance get strained. In its finest moments, the series evokes memories of the TV version a few years ago of the author’s the serpent tale, with its evocation of the opposing attractions and fears offered by science and belief. At its worst, it resembles Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Nevertheless, it does seem to provide the response to that debated question: “Ladies, take the bear.”

• To Cook a Bear is on Disney+ now.