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A intense discussion lately went viral on social media, after a user asked the question for females: would you rather find yourself stranded in the woods with a man or a bear? Like all the best hypothetical scenarios, it exposed vastly opposing perspectives and experiences, highlighted divides among genders, and was likely cause a deep personal dilemma if you thought on it for too long. Additionally, there came the predictable follow-up in which some males took to the internet to inform women how foolish they had been for choosing the animal and proceeded to limn the punishments they merited for that choice. This at minimum allowed the women who were uncertain over their choice to make it with a new confidence.

Portraying the Scenario

The Bear-Cooking Tale skillfully dramatises this clever small premise. This six-episode series is adapted on Scandinavian writer Mikael Niemi’s 2018 book of the same name (translated in 2020 for English readers). It traces the struggles of a clergyman (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his household as they come to start a new ministry in Kengis, a remote village in Sweden’s north, in 1852. In a place with few pleasures, not one of the locals especially appreciate his strict approach to alcohol and revelry, yet it is his defense of impoverished people – particularly the indigenous Sami, from which hails the preacher’s foster child the youth Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his conviction in societal fairness and equality that places him on a collision course against the Kengis local authorities.

The Antagonists

Soon collaborating opposing him are the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the fearsome mill owner the matron Sjödahl (Pernilla August), observed initially dismissing a newly injured worker with a month’s pay as he remains babbling at the sight his crushed hand, and all others who profit from a community who can be bought with some containers of the whisky provided by the unsettling store owner Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). However, in fairness, Lindmark’s creepiness pales once itinerant painter the artist Beronius appears in the story (the performer, providing an acting turn of exceptional unsettling intensity). If they are – like the pastor himself – just slightly beyond being stereotypes, they are at least potent archetypes.

Plot Progression

With the seeds of tension planted, the moment arrives to proceed with the storyline. The maid employed by the doctor, the character Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), accordingly goes missing from the woods. Signs of her flight and animal scratches upon a trunk are found yet she remains nowhere to be seen. Rumours and fears of a man/maid-eating beast roaming the woods spread, but the pastor has another theory that he and Jussi set out to verify.

A Strange Creation

To Cook a Bear is a slightly peculiar show. It creates a fine sense of the bleakness that lets distrust and bias and grim legends thrive based on local folklore that animals can be controlled or inhabited by the spirits of men. It avoids romanticise the tough existence experienced by the villagers, where violence, be it from nature or mankind, always looms at the periphery, poised to explode. Yet the personas rarely become beyond symbols – or perhaps, as the struggles amid fairness and revenge, rationality and religion, good and wickedness escalate, representative characters within a moral tale – which stops the entire production truly coming to life.

Stylistic Shifts

And then, there are the many tonally jarring instances where the clergyman’s skill to discover clues and determine the maid’s destiny becomes almost risible. He stands looking at shattered containers and clumps of hair within storage sheds like a combined the Belgian detective and Sherlock Holmes – with Jussi a particularly unfortunate Hastings-cum-Watson (neither of whom were required to taste a mixture of blood droplets and the boss’s spit to confirm that, yes, it was definitely coagulated blood on the site), prior to declaring his newest conclusion and extracting a body from a bog.

Clashing Agendas

The local leaders are determined proving that Hilda was killed by an animal, perhaps to protect the calm, perhaps to shield a fellow elite. The pastor is intent on proving the opposite, and the evidence so rapidly stacks up in his favour that again the show’s credibility and the viewer’s patience are tested. At its best, To Cook a Bear is reminiscent of the adaptation a few years ago of Sarah Perry’s the serpent tale, through its portrayal of the competing allures and terrors offered by science and belief. At its worst, it’s more like a bear-themed police procedural. Nevertheless, it does seem to offer the answer to that debated question: “Ladies, take the bear.”

• The series is on Disney+ currently.