🔗 Share this article

An intense debate lately spread widely across online platforms, following someone posed the question for females: which would you prefer be lost in a forest with a man or a bear? Similar to the most engaging thought experiments, it exposed wildly different perspectives and experiences, illuminated divides between the sexes, and could easily to induce a deep personal dilemma for anyone pondering on it extensively. Additionally, there came the almost inevitable coda in which some males took to the internet to inform females how stupid they were for choosing the bear and proceeded to limn the consequences they deserved for it. This at least enabled those females who had been hesitating about their decision to make it with a new confidence.

Portraying the Scenario

To Cook a Bear skillfully brings to life this nifty small premise. The six-part series is based on Scandinavian writer Mikael Niemi’s 2018 novel with the identical title (translated two years later for English readers). It follows the tribulations of a clergyman (the lead actor) and his household as they come to begin a fresh religious post within Kengis, an isolated settlement in Sweden’s north, during the mid-19th century. Within a community lacking many joys, not one of the inhabitants especially warm to his puritanical approach to alcohol and revelry, but it is his defense of impoverished people – particularly the native Sami population, from which hails the preacher’s adopted son the youth Jussi (the young actor) – and his conviction in societal fairness and equality that places him in direct opposition against the Kengis powers that be.

The Opposing Forces

Soon collaborating opposing him are the sheriff the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the fearsome factory proprietor Madam Sjödahl (Pernilla August), seen early on firing a newly injured worker with a month’s pay while he is still babbling upon seeing his crushed hand, and all others who benefit from a populace easily swayed with some containers of the whisky sold by the creepy shopkeeper Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). However, in fairness, Lindmark’s eeriness pales when itinerant painter Beronius arrives on the scene (the performer, delivering a performance of exceptional discomfiting power). If they are – similar to the clergyman – only a little more being stereotypes, they are at least potent archetypes.

Plot Progression

Once the foundations of conflict 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 flight and animal scratches on a tree are found but she is nowhere to be seen. Rumours and anxieties regarding a human-devouring bear roaming the woodland spread, but the pastor holds a different view that he and Jussi embark to prove.

A Strange Creation

To Cook a Bear is a somewhat peculiar show. It creates a fine sense of the desolation that lets suspicion and bias and dark myths flourish from the native legend that animals can be controlled or inhabited by the spirits of men. It avoids romanticise the tough existence led by the residents, in which brutality, whether that of the wild or mankind, lurks constantly at the periphery, waiting to erupt. Yet the personas rarely become beyond symbols – or perhaps, while the conflicts amid fairness and revenge, logic and religion, virtue and evil intensify, emblematic figures in a fable – preventing the whole thing truly becoming immersive.

Tonal Inconsistencies

Additionally, there are the many tonally jarring moments where the clergyman’s skill in finding evidence and discern Hilda’s fate becomes nearly laughable. He stands observing shattered containers and strands of fur within storage sheds like a combined Hercule Poirot and Sherlock Holmes – alongside Jussi a particularly unfortunate Hastings-cum-Watson (none of whom had 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), before announcing his newest conclusion and extracting a body out of a swamp.

Clashing Agendas

The village elite are bent on proving that the maid met her end by a bear, maybe to preserve the peace, or possibly to shield one of their own. The pastor is bent on proving the opposite, and the evidence so quickly accumulates supporting his view that once more the drama’s plausibility and audience tolerance are tested. In its finest moments, To Cook a Bear is reminiscent of the adaptation some years back of the author’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the competing allures and terrors offered by rational thought and belief. At its worst, it resembles a bear-themed police procedural. Still, it appears to provide the response to the earlier query: “Females, choose the animal.”

• To Cook a Bear is on Disney+ currently.