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An heated discussion recently spread widely across online platforms, after someone posed the question to women: which would you prefer be lost in a forest with a man or with a bear? Similar to the most engaging hypothetical scenarios, it exposed vastly opposing worldviews and experiences, illuminated divides between the sexes, and was likely to induce a deep personal dilemma if you thought on it extensively. Additionally, there came the almost inevitable coda in which some males came online to tell females how foolish they had been to select the bear and went on to describe the consequences they deserved for it. This at minimum allowed the women who were uncertain over their choice to decide with a new confidence.

Dramatising the Scenario

The Bear-Cooking Tale skillfully dramatises this nifty small premise. The six-part drama is adapted on Swedish author Mikael Niemi’s 2018 book of the same name (rendered two years later for English readers). It follows the struggles of a pastor (the lead actor) and his household as they come to start a new ministry in Kengis, an isolated settlement in Sweden’s north, in 1852. In a place lacking many joys, not one of the locals especially appreciate his puritanical approach to drinking and revelry, but it is his defense of the poor – especially the native Sami population, from which hails the pastor’s foster child the youth Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in societal fairness and equal rights that places him in direct opposition with the Kengis powers that be.

The Opposing Forces

Soon collaborating opposing him are the lawman Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the intimidating factory proprietor the matron Sjödahl (the actress), seen early on dismissing a recently mangled worker with minimal compensation while he is still babbling upon seeing of his pulped hand, and all others who profit from a community easily swayed with some containers of the whisky sold by the unsettling store owner Lindmark (the actor). Although, to be fair, Lindmark’s creepiness diminishes when travelling artist the artist Beronius appears on the scene (Simon J Berger, providing an acting turn of exceptional discomfiting power). If they are – like the pastor himself – just slightly beyond being stereotypes, they still serve as potent archetypes.

Plot Progression

Once the foundations of conflict planted, the moment arrives to get down with the storyline. The servant employed by the doctor, the character Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), accordingly vanishes in the forest. Signs of her flight and bear markings on a tree get discovered but she is completely absent. Rumours and fears of a man/maid-eating beast roaming the woodland circulate, but the pastor has another theory which he and his ward embark to prove.

A Strange Creation

To Cook a Bear is a somewhat odd beast. It creates a strong impression of the bleakness that lets distrust and bias and dark myths flourish from the native legend that animals might be dominated or inhabited by the spirits of men. And it doesn’t romanticise the hardscrabble life experienced by the residents, in which brutality, be it from nature or people, always looms at the periphery, poised to explode. Yet the personas seldom evolve more than ciphers – or perhaps, while the conflicts between justice and revenge, logic and religion, virtue and evil escalate, emblematic figures within a moral tale – preventing the entire production truly coming to life.

Tonal Inconsistencies

And then, there are the many stylistically clashing instances where the clergyman’s skill to discover clues and determine the maid’s destiny becomes nearly laughable. He stands looking at shattered containers and strands of fur in hay barns like a combined the Belgian detective the English sleuth – alongside Jussi a particularly unfortunate assistant figure (neither of whom were required to lick a mixture of blood spatter and the boss’s spit to confirm that indeed, it was definitely dried blood at the crime scene), prior to declaring his newest conclusion and pulling a body from a bog.

Opposing Goals

The local leaders are bent on demonstrating that the maid met her end by an animal, perhaps to preserve the calm, perhaps to shield a fellow elite. The clergyman is intent on proving otherwise, and the evidence so quickly accumulates supporting his view that again the drama’s plausibility and the viewer’s patience get strained. In its finest moments, the series is reminiscent of the TV version some years back of the author’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the competing attractions and fears offered by rational thought and belief. In its low points, it resembles Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Still, it does seem to provide the response to that debated question: “Ladies, take the bear.”

• To Cook a Bear is on Disney+ now.