🔗 Share this article

An heated debate lately went viral across online platforms, after someone asked a query to women: would you rather find yourself stranded in the woods with a man or with a bear? Like all the most engaging thought experiments, it exposed vastly opposing perspectives and life encounters, highlighted chasms between the sexes, and could easily to induce an existential crisis for anyone pondering on it extensively. There was also the almost inevitable coda where men of a certain stripe came online to tell women how foolish they had been to select the bear and went on to limn the punishments they deserved for it. This at least enabled those females who were uncertain over their choice to make it with renewed assurance.

Portraying the Scenario

The Bear-Cooking Tale skillfully brings to life this clever small premise. This six-episode series is adapted on Swedish author Mikael Niemi’s 2018 novel with the identical title (rendered two years later for an English audience). It traces the tribulations of a pastor (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his household when they arrive to begin a fresh religious post in 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 puritanical approach to drinking and revelry, yet it is his defense of the poor – especially the native Sami population, from which hails the pastor’s adopted son the youth Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his conviction in societal fairness and equality that sets him in direct opposition with the Kengis local authorities.

The Opposing Forces

Soon in cahoots opposing him include the lawman Brahe (the performer), the intimidating mill owner Madam Sjödahl (Pernilla August), seen initially dismissing a recently mangled laborer with a month’s pay as he remains babbling at the sight his crushed hand, and all others who benefit from a community who can be bought for a few bottles of liquor sold by the unsettling store owner Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). Although, to be fair, Lindmark’s eeriness pales when travelling artist the artist Beronius arrives on the scene (the performer, providing a performance of rare unsettling intensity). If they are – similar to the clergyman – only a little more than caricatures, they still serve as effective ones.

Plot Progression

Once the foundations of tension planted, the moment arrives to proceed to narrative business. The maid from the doctor’s house, the character Hilda (the actress), duly vanishes in the forest. Indications of her escape and bear markings upon a trunk get discovered yet she remains nowhere to be seen. Gossip and fears regarding a human-devouring beast prowling the woodland spread, but the pastor has another theory that he and Jussi embark to prove.

An Odd Beast

This Bear Drama is a somewhat peculiar show. It creates a fine sense of the bleakness that allows distrust and bias and grim legends thrive from the native legend that bears can be controlled or possessed by the spirits of humans. And it doesn’t idealising the tough existence led by the residents, in which brutality, whether that of the wild or people, lurks constantly at the periphery, waiting to erupt. But the characters seldom evolve more than ciphers – or perhaps, as the struggles amid fairness and revenge, rationality and religion, good and evil escalate, emblematic figures in a fable – which stops the entire production fully becoming immersive.

Tonal Inconsistencies

Additionally, exist numerous stylistically clashing moments where the clergyman’s skill in finding evidence and discern Hilda’s fate turns nearly laughable. He positions himself looking at broken milk pots and strands of fur in hay barns like a combined the Belgian detective and Sherlock Holmes – with Jussi a rather hapless assistant figure (neither of whom had to lick a blend of blood droplets and the boss’s spit to confirm that indeed, it was definitely coagulated blood at the crime scene), before announcing his newest conclusion and extracting a body from a bog.

Opposing Goals

The local leaders are determined demonstrating that Hilda was killed by a bear, maybe to protect the peace, or possibly to shield a fellow elite. The clergyman is intent on proving otherwise, and the evidence so rapidly stacks up supporting his view that once more the drama’s plausibility and audience tolerance are tested. In its finest moments, To Cook a Bear evokes memories of the adaptation a few years ago of the author’s the serpent tale, through its portrayal of the competing attractions and terrors offered by rational thought and religion. 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.