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A heated discussion recently went viral across online platforms, after a user posed the question to women: which would you prefer be lost 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 was likely cause a deep personal dilemma if you thought about it extensively. There was also the predictable coda in which men of a certain stripe took to the internet to tell women how stupid they had been to select the animal and went on to describe the consequences they deserved for that choice. This at minimum allowed those females who were uncertain about their decision to decide with a new confidence.

Portraying the Setup

The Bear-Cooking Tale effectively dramatises this nifty little setup. This six-episode series is adapted from Scandinavian writer Mikael Niemi’s 2018 book of the same name (translated in 2020 for an English audience). It traces the struggles of a pastor (the lead actor) and his family when they arrive to begin a new ministry within Kengis, an isolated village in Sweden’s north, in 1852. In a place with few pleasures, not one of the inhabitants particularly warm to his strict stance on alcohol and dancing, but it is his defense of the poor – especially the indigenous Sami, from which comes the pastor’s foster child the youth Jussi (the young actor) – and his belief in societal fairness and equal rights that sets him in direct opposition with the Kengis powers that be.

The Antagonists

Soon collaborating opposing him are the sheriff the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the intimidating mill owner the matron Sjödahl (Pernilla August), seen early on dismissing a recently mangled laborer with a month’s pay while he is still babbling upon seeing his crushed hand, and anyone else who profit from a populace easily swayed with some containers of liquor sold by the unsettling store owner the merchant Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). Although, in fairness, Lindmark’s creepiness diminishes when travelling artist the artist Beronius arrives in the story (the performer, delivering a performance of exceptional discomfiting power). If they are – like the pastor himself – 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 servant employed by the doctor, the character Hilda (the actress), accordingly goes missing from the woods. Indications of her flight and animal scratches on a tree are found but she is completely absent. Gossip and fears of a man/maid-eating bear prowling the woodland spread, yet the clergyman holds a different view which he and his ward set out to prove.

A Strange Creation

To Cook a Bear is a slightly peculiar show. It creates a fine sense of the desolation that lets distrust and prejudice and grim legends flourish from the native legend that animals might be dominated or possessed by the spirits of men. And it doesn’t romanticise the tough existence experienced by the residents, where violence, whether that of the wild or people, lurks constantly on the edges, waiting to erupt. Yet the personas seldom evolve beyond symbols – or maybe, as the struggles amid fairness and vengeance, logic and faith, good and evil escalate, emblematic figures in a fable – preventing the entire production truly becoming immersive.

Stylistic Shifts

And then, there are the many tonally jarring instances in which the clergyman’s skill in finding evidence and discern Hilda’s fate becomes almost risible. He positions himself observing shattered containers and clumps of hair in hay barns like a combined the Belgian detective and Sherlock Holmes – with Jussi a rather hapless Hastings-cum-Watson (neither of whom were required to lick a blend of blood droplets and the boss’s spit to agree that indeed, it was clearly coagulated blood at the crime scene), prior to declaring his newest conclusion and extracting a corpse out of a swamp.

Clashing Agendas

The village elite are bent on proving that the maid met her end by an animal, maybe to protect the peace, perhaps to protect one of their own. The clergyman is intent on establishing the opposite, and the proof so quickly stacks up in his favour that once more the show’s credibility and the viewer’s patience are tested. In its finest moments, To Cook a Bear evokes memories of the TV version some years back of the author’s The Essex Serpent, through its portrayal of the competing attractions and fears presented by science and religion. At its worst, it resembles Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Still, it does seem to offer the answer to the earlier query: “Females, choose the animal.”

• To Cook a Bear streams on Disney+ currently.