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An heated discussion recently spread widely on social media, following someone posed a query to women: would you rather be lost in the woods with a man or with a bear? Like all the best thought experiments, it revealed wildly different perspectives and experiences, highlighted divides between the sexes, and was likely to induce an existential crisis if you thought about it for too long. There was also the almost inevitable coda where some males took to the internet to tell females how foolish they had been to select the bear and proceeded to describe the punishments they merited for that choice. This at least enabled the women who had been hesitating about their decision to make it with renewed assurance.

Dramatising the Setup

The Bear-Cooking Tale effectively brings to life this nifty small premise. This six-episode drama is based on Scandinavian writer Mikael Niemi’s 2018 book of the same name (translated in 2020 for an English audience). It follows the struggles of a pastor (the lead actor) and his household as they come to start a new ministry within Kengis, an isolated settlement in Sweden’s north, during the mid-19th century. In a place lacking many joys, none of the locals particularly appreciate his puritanical approach to drinking and revelry, but it is his protection of impoverished people – especially the indigenous Sami, from which comes the pastor’s foster child the youth Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his conviction in social justice and equality that sets him on a collision course with the Kengis powers that be.

The Antagonists

Quickly collaborating opposing him include the sheriff the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the fearsome factory proprietor Madam Sjödahl (Pernilla August), seen early on firing a recently mangled laborer with a month’s pay as he remains babbling at the sight his crushed hand, and all others who profit from a populace who can be bought with some containers of the whisky provided by the creepy shopkeeper Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). However, in fairness, Lindmark’s creepiness pales once itinerant painter the artist Beronius arrives on the scene (Simon J Berger, delivering an acting turn of exceptional 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 sown, the moment arrives to proceed to narrative business. The maid from the doctor’s house, the character Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), duly vanishes from the woods. Indications of her escape and bear markings upon a trunk get discovered but she is completely absent. Gossip and anxieties of a man/maid-eating bear roaming the woodland circulate, but the pastor holds a different view which he and his ward set out to prove.

A Strange Creation

To Cook a Bear is a slightly odd beast. It creates a strong impression of the bleakness that allows suspicion and bias and dark myths flourish from the native legend that animals might be dominated or inhabited by the spirits of humans. It avoids idealising the tough existence experienced by the villagers, where brutality, whether that of the wild or mankind, always looms on the edges, waiting to erupt. Yet the personas rarely become more than ciphers – or maybe, as the struggles between justice and vengeance, rationality and faith, good and wickedness escalate, representative characters in a fable – which stops the whole thing fully coming to life.

Tonal Inconsistencies

And then, exist numerous stylistically clashing moments in which the pastor’s ability in finding evidence and determine the maid’s destiny turns nearly laughable. He stands observing broken milk pots and clumps of hair within storage sheds like a combined the Belgian detective and Sherlock Holmes – with Jussi a rather hapless assistant figure (neither of whom had to lick a mixture of blood spatter and the boss’s spit to confirm that indeed, it was clearly coagulated blood at the crime scene), before announcing his latest deduction and pulling a corpse from a bog.

Clashing Agendas

The village elite are bent on demonstrating that the maid met her end by a bear, perhaps to preserve the calm, or possibly to shield a fellow elite. The clergyman is intent on proving the opposite, and the proof so quickly stacks up supporting his view that again the show’s credibility 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 Essex Serpent, through its portrayal of the opposing attractions and fears presented by rational thought and religion. In its low points, it resembles Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Still, it appears to provide the response to the earlier query: “Females, choose the animal.”

• To Cook a Bear is on Disney+ currently.