🔗 Share this article

An heated debate lately went viral on social media, following a user posed a query for females: which would you prefer be lost in the woods with a man or a bear? Similar to the best hypothetical scenarios, it revealed wildly different worldviews and experiences, highlighted chasms among genders, and was likely cause a deep personal dilemma for anyone pondering about it extensively. Additionally, there came the almost inevitable follow-up where men of a certain stripe took to the internet to inform females how foolish they were for choosing the animal and went on to describe the consequences they merited for that choice. This at minimum enabled those females who were uncertain over their choice to decide with a new confidence.

Dramatising the Setup

The Bear-Cooking Tale effectively brings to life this nifty small premise. The six-part series is based from Swedish author the novelist’s 2018 novel with the identical title (rendered two years later for English readers). It traces the tribulations of a clergyman (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his family when they arrive to start a new ministry within Kengis, a remote settlement in Sweden’s north, during the mid-19th century. In a place with few pleasures, not one of the inhabitants especially warm to his strict approach to alcohol and dancing, but it is his defense of impoverished people – particularly the native Sami population, from which comes the pastor’s foster child Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in social justice and equal rights that places him in direct opposition with the Kengis powers that be.

The Opposing Forces

Quickly in cahoots against him include the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the fearsome factory proprietor Madam Sjödahl (Pernilla August), seen early on dismissing a recently mangled laborer with a month’s pay as he remains gibbering upon seeing his crushed hand, and all others who profit from a populace who can be bought with some containers of the whisky sold by the creepy store owner the merchant Lindmark (the actor). Although, to be fair, Lindmark’s creepiness diminishes when itinerant painter the artist Beronius appears on the scene (the performer, providing a performance of rare unsettling intensity). While they remain – similar to the clergyman – just slightly beyond being stereotypes, they are at least potent archetypes.

Narrative Development

Once the foundations of tension sown, the moment arrives to get down with the storyline. The maid from the doctor’s house, the character Hilda (the actress), duly vanishes from the woods. Signs of her flight and bear markings on a tree get discovered yet she remains nowhere to be seen. Rumours and anxieties regarding a human-devouring bear prowling the woodland spread, but the pastor holds a different view that he and Jussi set out to verify.

An Odd Beast

This Bear Drama is a slightly odd beast. It creates a fine sense of the bleakness that allows distrust and bias and grim legends flourish based on local folklore that animals might be dominated or inhabited by the spirits of men. It avoids idealising the hardscrabble life experienced by the residents, in which brutality, whether that of the wild or mankind, always looms on the edges, waiting to erupt. But the characters rarely become beyond symbols – or maybe, while the conflicts between justice and vengeance, rationality and faith, virtue and evil escalate, emblematic figures within a moral tale – which stops the entire production fully coming to life.

Stylistic Shifts

And then, there are numerous tonally jarring moments in which the pastor’s ability in finding evidence and determine Hilda’s fate becomes almost risible. He stands looking at broken milk pots and strands of fur within storage sheds like a combined the Belgian detective the English sleuth – with Jussi a particularly unfortunate assistant figure (neither of whom were required to taste a mixture of blood spatter and the boss’s spit to confirm that, yes, it was definitely dried blood at the crime scene), prior to declaring his latest deduction and pulling a body out of a swamp.

Opposing Goals

The village elite are determined demonstrating that the maid met her end by an animal, perhaps to protect the peace, perhaps to shield one of their own. The pastor is bent on establishing the opposite, and the evidence so rapidly accumulates in his favour that once more the show’s credibility and the viewer’s patience are tested. In its finest moments, the series is reminiscent of the adaptation a few years ago of Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, through its portrayal of the opposing allures and terrors offered by rational thought and religion. In its low points, it’s more like a bear-themed police procedural. Still, it does seem to provide the response to that debated question: “Ladies, take the bear.”

• To Cook a Bear is on Disney+ currently.