🔗 Share this article

A intense discussion recently spread widely across online platforms, after a user asked a query to women: would you rather find yourself stranded in a forest alongside a male or a bear? Like all the best hypothetical scenarios, it exposed vastly opposing perspectives and experiences, highlighted chasms among genders, and could easily cause an existential crisis if you thought about it for too long. Additionally, there came the predictable coda in which some males came online to inform women how foolish they had been to select the animal and went on to limn the consequences they deserved for that choice. This at minimum allowed the women who had been hesitating over their choice to decide with a new confidence.

Portraying the Setup

The Bear-Cooking Tale skillfully dramatises this clever small premise. This six-episode drama is adapted on Swedish author Mikael Niemi’s 2018 book of the same name (translated in 2020 for English readers). It follows the tribulations of a pastor (the lead actor) and his household as they come to start a fresh religious post in Kengis, an isolated village in northern Sweden, in 1852. In a place lacking many joys, not one of the locals particularly appreciate his puritanical approach to alcohol and revelry, but it is his protection of impoverished people – particularly the indigenous Sami, from which hails the pastor’s foster child the youth Jussi (the young actor) – and his belief in societal fairness and equality that places him on a collision course against the Kengis powers that be.

The Opposing Forces

Quickly in cahoots against him are the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the intimidating factory proprietor the matron Sjödahl (the actress), seen early on firing a recently mangled worker with minimal compensation as he remains gibbering upon seeing of his pulped hand, and anyone else who profit from a populace who can be bought for a few bottles of the whisky provided by the creepy shopkeeper Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). However, in fairness, Lindmark’s eeriness pales when itinerant painter the artist Beronius arrives on the scene (Simon J Berger, delivering a performance of exceptional unsettling intensity). If they are – like the pastor himself – only a little more than caricatures, they still serve as effective ones.

Narrative Development

With the seeds of conflict planted, it is time to get down to narrative business. The servant from the doctor’s house, Hilda (the actress), duly goes missing from the woods. Signs of her escape and animal scratches upon a trunk get discovered yet she remains nowhere to be seen. Gossip and fears regarding a human-devouring bear roaming the woods spread, yet the clergyman has another theory that he and Jussi set out to prove.

An Odd Beast

To Cook a Bear is a slightly peculiar show. It conjures a strong impression of the bleakness that allows distrust and bias and grim legends thrive from the native legend that animals can be controlled or inhabited by the souls of humans. It avoids idealising the hardscrabble life led by the residents, in which brutality, be it from the wild or mankind, always looms at the periphery, waiting to erupt. Yet the personas seldom evolve beyond symbols – or perhaps, while the conflicts between justice and revenge, rationality and religion, virtue and evil escalate, representative characters in a fable – preventing the entire production truly becoming immersive.

Tonal Inconsistencies

Additionally, there are numerous stylistically clashing moments in which the clergyman’s skill to discover clues and discern Hilda’s fate turns nearly laughable. He positions himself looking at shattered containers and clumps of hair within storage sheds like a combined Hercule Poirot the English sleuth – with Jussi a particularly unfortunate assistant figure (neither of whom were required to taste a mixture of blood spatter and saliva from his superior to confirm that, yes, it was clearly dried blood at the crime scene), prior to declaring his newest conclusion and extracting a corpse out of a swamp.

Clashing Agendas

The local leaders are bent on proving that Hilda was killed by an animal, perhaps to preserve the peace, perhaps to protect a fellow elite. The clergyman is bent on establishing the opposite, and the proof so quickly accumulates supporting his view that once more the show’s credibility and the viewer’s patience are tested. In its finest moments, the series evokes memories of the adaptation some years back of the author’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation 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 offer the answer to that debated question: “Ladies, take the bear.”

• The series streams on Disney+ currently.