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A intense debate lately went viral across online platforms, after a user asked the question to women: which would you prefer find yourself stranded in a forest with a man or with a bear? Like all the most engaging hypothetical scenarios, it revealed wildly different perspectives and experiences, highlighted divides among genders, and was likely cause a deep personal dilemma if you thought about it extensively. There was also the almost inevitable coda in which some males came online to tell females how stupid they had been for choosing the animal and went on to limn the punishments they deserved for that choice. This at least allowed the women who were uncertain about their decision to make it with renewed assurance.

Dramatising the Scenario

The Bear-Cooking Tale skillfully dramatises this clever small premise. This six-episode drama is based on Scandinavian writer Mikael Niemi’s 2018 novel with the identical title (translated in 2020 for English readers). It traces the struggles of a clergyman (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his family as they come to begin a fresh religious post within Kengis, an isolated settlement in Sweden’s north, in 1852. Within a community with few pleasures, none of the locals particularly warm to his strict stance on alcohol and dancing, but it is his protection of the poor – especially the native Sami population, from which comes the preacher’s adopted son Jussi (the young actor) – and his conviction in societal fairness and equal rights that places him in direct opposition with the Kengis powers that be.

The Antagonists

Quickly collaborating against him are the lawman Brahe (the performer), the intimidating factory proprietor Madam Sjödahl (Pernilla August), seen initially dismissing a recently mangled worker with minimal compensation as he remains babbling upon seeing his crushed hand, and all others who profit from a populace who can be bought with some containers of liquor sold by the unsettling shopkeeper the merchant Lindmark (the actor). Although, in fairness, Lindmark’s eeriness diminishes when travelling artist the artist Beronius arrives in the story (Simon J Berger, delivering a performance of rare unsettling intensity). If they are – like the pastor himself – just slightly beyond being stereotypes, they are at least effective ones.

Plot Progression

With the seeds of conflict sown, it is time to proceed to narrative business. The maid employed by the doctor, the character Hilda (the actress), duly goes missing in the forest. Signs of her escape and animal scratches on a tree are found but she is completely absent. Rumours and anxieties regarding a human-devouring bear prowling the woods spread, yet the clergyman has another theory which he and his ward set out to prove.

A Strange Creation

This Bear Drama is a somewhat odd beast. It conjures a fine sense of the bleakness that lets distrust and prejudice and grim legends thrive from the native legend that bears might be dominated or inhabited by the souls of humans. And it doesn’t idealising the hardscrabble life led by the villagers, in which brutality, be it from the wild or people, always looms at the periphery, poised to explode. But the characters rarely become beyond symbols – or maybe, as the struggles amid fairness and vengeance, rationality and religion, virtue and wickedness escalate, emblematic figures in a fable – which stops the whole thing fully becoming immersive.

Stylistic Shifts

Additionally, exist numerous tonally jarring moments where the clergyman’s skill to discover clues and determine the maid’s destiny becomes almost risible. He positions himself observing broken milk pots and strands of fur within storage sheds like a combined Hercule Poirot the English sleuth – alongside Jussi a particularly unfortunate assistant figure (none of whom were required to lick a blend of blood spatter and the boss’s spit to confirm that, yes, it was definitely coagulated blood at the crime scene), prior to declaring his newest conclusion and pulling a body out of a swamp.

Opposing Goals

The village elite are bent on demonstrating that the maid was killed by a bear, perhaps to preserve the calm, perhaps to shield a fellow elite. The pastor is bent on establishing the opposite, and the evidence so rapidly accumulates supporting his view that again the show’s credibility and the viewer’s patience are tested. In its finest moments, To Cook a Bear is reminiscent of the TV version some years back of the author’s the serpent tale, through its portrayal of the opposing allures and fears offered by rational thought and religion. At its worst, it resembles a bear-themed police procedural. Still, it appears to provide the answer to that debated question: “Females, choose the animal.”

• To Cook a Bear is on Disney+ currently.