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An heated discussion recently spread widely across online platforms, after a user asked a query to women: which would you prefer find yourself stranded in a forest alongside a male or with a bear? Similar to the most engaging thought experiments, it revealed wildly different worldviews and experiences, illuminated chasms among genders, and could easily to induce a deep personal dilemma for anyone pondering on it for too long. There was also the predictable follow-up in which some males came online to inform females how foolish they had been to select the animal and proceeded to describe the punishments they deserved for that choice. This at minimum enabled the women who had been hesitating about their decision to make it with renewed assurance.

Portraying the Scenario

The Bear-Cooking Tale skillfully dramatises this nifty little setup. This six-episode 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 (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his family when they arrive to start a fresh religious post within Kengis, a remote settlement in Sweden’s north, in 1852. Within a community lacking many joys, none of the locals particularly warm to his puritanical approach to drinking and dancing, but it is his defense of the poor – particularly the native Sami population, from among whom comes the preacher’s foster child the youth Jussi (the young actor) – and his belief in societal fairness and equality that sets him in direct opposition against the Kengis local authorities.

The Opposing Forces

Soon in cahoots opposing him include the lawman the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the fearsome factory proprietor the matron Sjödahl (Pernilla August), seen early on firing a recently mangled worker with a month’s pay as he remains gibbering at the sight of his pulped hand, and all others who benefit from a community who can be bought with some containers of the whisky sold by the creepy shopkeeper the merchant Lindmark (the actor). Although, in fairness, Lindmark’s creepiness diminishes when travelling artist Beronius appears on the scene (the performer, delivering an acting turn of rare unsettling intensity). While they remain – like the pastor himself – only a little more than caricatures, they still serve as potent archetypes.

Narrative Development

With the seeds of conflict planted, it is time to proceed to narrative business. The maid from the doctor’s house, Hilda (the actress), accordingly vanishes in the forest. Signs of her flight and bear markings on a tree get discovered but she is completely absent. Gossip and fears regarding a human-devouring bear prowling the woodland spread, yet the clergyman holds a different view that he and Jussi set out to verify.

A Strange Creation

To Cook a Bear is a slightly odd beast. It conjures a fine sense of the bleakness that lets distrust and bias and grim legends thrive from the native legend that bears can be controlled or possessed by the spirits of humans. It avoids idealising the hardscrabble life led by the villagers, where brutality, whether that of nature or mankind, lurks constantly on the edges, poised to explode. But the characters seldom evolve more than ciphers – or maybe, as the struggles between justice and revenge, rationality and religion, good and evil escalate, representative characters within a moral tale – preventing the whole thing fully coming to life.

Stylistic Shifts

And then, exist numerous stylistically clashing instances where the pastor’s ability in finding evidence and discern the maid’s destiny turns nearly laughable. He positions himself looking at broken milk pots and clumps of hair in hay barns like a combined Hercule Poirot the English sleuth – alongside Jussi a rather hapless Hastings-cum-Watson (none of whom were required to taste a blend of blood droplets and the boss’s spit to confirm that indeed, it was definitely dried blood on the site), prior to declaring his latest deduction and extracting a corpse out of a swamp.

Clashing Agendas

The local leaders are bent on demonstrating that the maid was killed by an animal, perhaps to preserve the calm, perhaps to protect one of their own. The pastor is intent on proving the opposite, and the evidence so rapidly accumulates supporting his view that again the show’s credibility and the viewer’s patience get strained. In its finest moments, the series evokes memories of the TV version some years back of the author’s The Essex Serpent, through its portrayal of the opposing allures and fears presented by rational thought and religion. In its low points, it resembles Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Nevertheless, it does seem to provide the answer to the earlier query: “Females, choose the animal.”

• To Cook a Bear is on Disney+ now.