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An intense debate lately spread widely across online platforms, following someone asked the question to women: which would you prefer find yourself stranded in a forest with a man or a bear? Like all the best thought experiments, it revealed wildly different worldviews and life encounters, illuminated chasms between the sexes, and was likely to induce a deep personal dilemma for anyone pondering about it for too long. Additionally, there came the almost inevitable follow-up in which men of a certain stripe took to the internet to inform women how stupid they were to select the bear and proceeded to limn the consequences they merited for that choice. This at least enabled those females who had been hesitating about their decision to decide with a new confidence.

Portraying the Setup

The Bear-Cooking Tale effectively dramatises this clever little setup. The six-part series is based from Scandinavian writer Mikael Niemi’s 2018 book of the same name (translated in 2020 for an English audience). It follows the tribulations of a pastor (the lead actor) and his household as they come to start a new ministry in Kengis, a remote village in northern Sweden, during the mid-19th century. In a place lacking many joys, none of the locals especially warm to his puritanical stance on drinking and dancing, yet it is his defense of impoverished people – particularly the indigenous Sami, from which hails the preacher’s adopted son the youth Jussi (the young actor) – and his conviction in societal fairness and equal rights that sets him in direct opposition with the Kengis powers that be.

The Opposing Forces

Soon in cahoots against him are the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the fearsome mill owner Madam Sjödahl (Pernilla August), seen initially dismissing a newly injured laborer with minimal compensation as he remains babbling at the sight of his pulped hand, and anyone else who profit from a community easily swayed for a few bottles of liquor sold by the creepy store owner the merchant Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s creepiness pales once itinerant painter Beronius appears in the story (Simon J Berger, providing a performance of exceptional unsettling intensity). If they are – similar to the clergyman – only a little more being stereotypes, they still serve as potent archetypes.

Plot Progression

With the seeds of tension sown, the moment arrives to get down with the storyline. The servant from the doctor’s house, Hilda (the actress), accordingly vanishes from the woods. Indications of her flight and animal scratches upon a trunk get discovered yet she remains completely absent. Gossip and anxieties of a man/maid-eating beast prowling the woodland circulate, but the pastor holds a different view which he and his ward set out to verify.

A Strange Creation

To Cook a Bear is a slightly peculiar show. It creates a fine sense of the bleakness that lets suspicion and prejudice and grim legends thrive from the native legend that animals might be dominated or inhabited by the spirits of humans. And it doesn’t idealising the tough existence experienced by the residents, where brutality, be it from the wild or mankind, lurks constantly on the edges, waiting to erupt. Yet the personas rarely become more than ciphers – or maybe, while the conflicts between justice and vengeance, rationality and faith, virtue and evil intensify, representative characters within a moral tale – which stops the entire production truly becoming immersive.

Tonal Inconsistencies

And then, exist the many tonally jarring moments in which the clergyman’s skill to discover clues and determine Hilda’s fate becomes nearly laughable. He positions himself looking at shattered containers and clumps of hair within storage sheds as a fusion of the Belgian detective and Sherlock Holmes – with Jussi a particularly unfortunate assistant figure (none of whom were required to taste a mixture of blood spatter and saliva from his superior to confirm that, yes, it was definitely dried blood at the crime scene), before announcing his latest deduction and extracting a body from a bog.

Clashing Agendas

The village elite are bent on proving that the maid was killed by an animal, maybe to preserve the peace, or possibly to protect one of their own. The pastor is intent on establishing otherwise, and the evidence so quickly accumulates in his favour that again the drama’s plausibility and the viewer’s patience are tested. In its finest moments, To Cook a Bear evokes memories of the TV version a few years ago of the author’s The Essex Serpent, through its portrayal of the competing allures and terrors presented by science and religion. At its worst, it’s more like Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Still, it appears to provide the answer to that debated question: “Ladies, take the bear.”

• To Cook a Bear streams on Disney+ now.