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A heated debate recently went viral across online platforms, after a user posed the question to women: would you rather find yourself stranded in the woods with a man or with a bear? Like all the best hypothetical scenarios, it revealed wildly different worldviews and life encounters, highlighted chasms between the sexes, and was likely to induce 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 inform women how stupid they had been for choosing the animal and proceeded to limn the consequences they merited for it. This at least allowed those females who were uncertain about their decision to make it with a new confidence.

Dramatising the Setup

The Bear-Cooking Tale skillfully brings to life this nifty little setup. This six-episode drama is based on Swedish author the novelist’s 2018 novel of the same name (translated in 2020 for English readers). It traces the tribulations of a pastor (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his family when they arrive to start a fresh religious post in Kengis, a remote settlement in northern Sweden, in 1852. In a place lacking many joys, not one of the inhabitants particularly appreciate his strict stance on drinking and dancing, but it is his protection of impoverished people – particularly the native Sami population, from among whom hails the pastor’s adopted son the youth Jussi (the young actor) – and his belief in social justice and equality that sets him in direct opposition with the Kengis powers that be.

The Opposing Forces

Soon in cahoots against him include the lawman the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the fearsome factory proprietor the matron Sjödahl (Pernilla August), seen early on firing a recently mangled laborer with a month’s pay as he remains babbling at the sight of his pulped hand, and anyone else who benefit from a community easily swayed for a few bottles of liquor provided by the unsettling shopkeeper the merchant Lindmark (the actor). Although, in fairness, Lindmark’s creepiness pales once travelling artist Beronius appears on the scene (Simon J Berger, providing a performance of exceptional unsettling intensity). If they are – similar to the clergyman – only a little more than caricatures, they are at least effective ones.

Narrative Development

Once the foundations of tension planted, the moment arrives to proceed with the storyline. The maid employed by the doctor, the character Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), duly goes missing from the woods. Signs of her escape and bear markings on a tree get discovered yet she remains completely absent. Gossip and anxieties regarding a human-devouring beast prowling the woods circulate, yet the clergyman holds a different view which he and his ward embark to prove.

A Strange Creation

To Cook a Bear is a slightly odd beast. It creates a fine sense of the bleakness that allows suspicion and prejudice and grim legends thrive from the native legend that animals might be dominated or possessed by the spirits of men. And it doesn’t idealising the hardscrabble life led by the residents, where brutality, whether that of the wild or people, lurks constantly on the edges, waiting to erupt. But the characters seldom evolve more than ciphers – or maybe, as the struggles amid fairness and revenge, rationality and faith, virtue and evil intensify, representative characters in a fable – preventing the entire production truly becoming immersive.

Stylistic Shifts

Additionally, there are the many tonally jarring instances where the pastor’s ability to discover clues and discern Hilda’s fate becomes almost risible. He stands observing shattered containers 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 lick a mixture of blood spatter and the boss’s spit to agree that, yes, it was definitely dried blood at the crime scene), before announcing his newest conclusion and extracting a body from a bog.

Opposing Goals

The local leaders are bent on demonstrating that Hilda was killed by an animal, maybe to protect the calm, or possibly to protect a fellow elite. The clergyman is bent on proving otherwise, and the evidence so rapidly accumulates in his favour that once more the show’s credibility and audience tolerance 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 opposing attractions and terrors offered by rational thought and belief. In its low points, it resembles a bear-themed police procedural. Nevertheless, it does seem to offer the answer to that debated question: “Females, choose the animal.”

• The series is on Disney+ now.