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A intense debate recently went viral across online platforms, following someone posed a query for females: would you rather be lost in a forest alongside a male or with a bear? Like all the best hypothetical scenarios, it exposed vastly opposing perspectives and life encounters, highlighted divides between the sexes, and could easily cause a deep personal dilemma for anyone pondering about it extensively. Additionally, there came the almost inevitable follow-up in which men of a certain stripe came online to tell females how foolish they had been for choosing the bear and went on to limn the punishments they deserved for it. This at least enabled the women who were uncertain about their decision to make it with renewed assurance.

Dramatising the Scenario

The Bear-Cooking Tale effectively dramatises this nifty small premise. The six-part series is based from Scandinavian writer the novelist’s 2018 book with the identical title (translated two years later for an English audience). It traces the struggles of a pastor (the lead actor) and his household as they come to start a fresh religious post in Kengis, an isolated village in Sweden’s north, during the mid-19th century. In a place with few pleasures, not one of the locals especially warm to his strict approach to drinking and revelry, but it is his protection of the poor – particularly the indigenous Sami, from among whom comes the preacher’s adopted son the youth Jussi (the young actor) – and his belief in societal fairness and equality that places him on a collision course with the Kengis powers that be.

The Opposing Forces

Soon collaborating against him include the lawman Brahe (the performer), the intimidating factory proprietor the matron Sjödahl (Pernilla August), seen early on firing a recently mangled worker with minimal compensation as he remains gibbering at the sight of his pulped hand, and anyone else who benefit from a community easily swayed for a few bottles of the whisky provided by the unsettling store owner Lindmark (the actor). Although, to be fair, Lindmark’s creepiness diminishes when itinerant painter Beronius arrives on the scene (the performer, providing a performance of exceptional discomfiting power). If they are – like the pastor himself – only a little more than caricatures, they still serve as potent archetypes.

Plot Progression

With the seeds of tension sown, the moment arrives to get down with the storyline. The maid employed by the doctor, Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), accordingly vanishes from the woods. Signs of her escape and animal scratches upon a trunk get discovered yet she remains completely absent. Gossip and anxieties of a man/maid-eating bear prowling the woods spread, but the pastor holds a different view which he and his ward set out to verify.

An Odd Beast

This Bear Drama is a somewhat peculiar show. It conjures a fine sense of the desolation that lets suspicion and bias and dark myths thrive from the native legend that bears might be dominated or possessed by the spirits of humans. And it doesn’t idealising the tough existence led by the villagers, where violence, whether that of the wild or mankind, always looms at the periphery, waiting to erupt. Yet the personas rarely become beyond symbols – or maybe, while the conflicts between justice and vengeance, rationality and religion, good and evil escalate, emblematic figures within a moral tale – which stops the whole thing fully coming to life.

Stylistic Shifts

Additionally, there are numerous stylistically clashing moments in which the pastor’s ability in finding evidence and discern Hilda’s fate turns nearly laughable. He stands looking at broken milk pots and clumps of hair in hay barns as a fusion of Hercule Poirot the English sleuth – with Jussi a rather hapless assistant figure (none of whom had to taste a blend of blood droplets and the boss’s spit to agree that indeed, it was definitely coagulated blood at the crime scene), before announcing his latest deduction and extracting a body from a bog.

Opposing Goals

The village elite are bent on proving that the maid met her end by a bear, perhaps to preserve the calm, or possibly to protect a fellow elite. The clergyman is bent on establishing otherwise, and the evidence so rapidly stacks up in his favour that again the drama’s plausibility and the viewer’s patience get strained. At its best, To Cook a Bear evokes memories of the adaptation a few years ago of the author’s the serpent tale, through its portrayal of the competing attractions and fears offered by science and religion. At its worst, it resembles Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Nevertheless, it does seem to offer the answer to that debated question: “Females, choose the animal.”

• To Cook a Bear streams on Disney+ currently.