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A intense discussion lately spread widely on social media, after a user asked a query to women: would you rather be lost in a forest with a man or a bear? Like all the best hypothetical scenarios, it exposed wildly different perspectives and experiences, illuminated divides between the sexes, and was likely cause a deep personal dilemma if you thought on it extensively. Additionally, there came the predictable coda where men of a certain stripe came online to tell women how stupid they had been to select the animal and proceeded to describe the consequences they deserved for it. This at least enabled the women who had been hesitating over their choice to decide with a new confidence.

Portraying the Setup

The Bear-Cooking Tale skillfully dramatises this clever small premise. The six-part series is based from Scandinavian writer Mikael Niemi’s 2018 book of the same name (translated two years later for an English audience). It follows the struggles of a clergyman (the lead actor) and his family as they come to begin a fresh religious post in Kengis, a remote settlement in Sweden’s north, during the mid-19th century. Within a community lacking many joys, none of the locals especially warm to his strict stance on drinking and revelry, yet it is his defense of impoverished people – particularly the indigenous Sami, from among whom comes the pastor’s adopted son Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his conviction in societal fairness and equality that sets him on a collision course against the Kengis powers that be.

The Opposing Forces

Quickly collaborating against him are the sheriff the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the intimidating factory proprietor Madam Sjödahl (Pernilla August), seen initially firing a recently mangled laborer with a month’s pay as he remains gibbering at the sight his crushed hand, and anyone else who benefit from a populace easily swayed with some containers of liquor provided by the creepy store owner Lindmark (the actor). However, in fairness, Lindmark’s creepiness diminishes when itinerant painter the artist Beronius appears in the story (the performer, providing a performance of exceptional discomfiting power). 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 conflict planted, it is time to proceed with the storyline. The maid from the doctor’s house, Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), accordingly goes missing in the forest. Signs of her escape and animal scratches on a tree get discovered but she is completely absent. Rumours and fears of a man/maid-eating beast roaming the woodland spread, but the pastor holds a different view which he and his ward set out to verify.

An Odd Beast

To Cook a Bear is a somewhat peculiar show. It conjures a fine sense of the desolation that lets suspicion and prejudice and dark myths flourish from the native legend that animals can be controlled or possessed by the spirits of humans. And it doesn’t romanticise the tough existence led by the residents, where violence, whether that of the wild or people, always looms at the periphery, waiting to erupt. But the characters seldom evolve more than ciphers – or maybe, as the struggles amid fairness and revenge, logic and religion, virtue and evil intensify, representative characters within a moral tale – preventing the whole thing fully coming to life.

Stylistic Shifts

Additionally, there are the many stylistically clashing moments in which the clergyman’s skill to discover clues and determine Hilda’s fate becomes nearly laughable. He positions himself looking at broken milk pots and strands of fur in hay barns like a combined Hercule Poirot and Sherlock Holmes – with Jussi a rather hapless assistant figure (none of whom were required to taste a mixture of blood spatter and saliva from his superior to agree that, yes, it was definitely dried blood at the crime scene), prior to declaring his newest conclusion and extracting a corpse from a bog.

Clashing Agendas

The village elite are determined proving that the maid met her end by an animal, maybe to protect the calm, perhaps to shield one of their own. The pastor is bent on proving the opposite, and the evidence so rapidly accumulates supporting his view that again the drama’s plausibility and the viewer’s patience are tested. At its best, the series evokes memories of the TV version a few years ago of Sarah Perry’s the serpent tale, with its evocation of the competing allures and fears presented by science and belief. At its worst, it’s more like Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Still, it appears to offer the response to the earlier query: “Ladies, take the bear.”

• To Cook a Bear streams on Disney+ now.