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An heated debate lately went viral across online platforms, after someone asked the question to women: would you rather be lost in a forest with a man or a bear? Similar to the most engaging thought experiments, it exposed wildly different worldviews and experiences, illuminated divides between the sexes, and was likely cause a deep personal dilemma for anyone pondering about it extensively. There was also the predictable coda where men of a certain stripe took to the internet to tell women how stupid they had been for choosing the bear and proceeded to describe the punishments they deserved for that choice. This at minimum enabled those females who had been hesitating over their choice to make it with a new confidence.

Dramatising the Scenario

To Cook a Bear effectively dramatises this clever small premise. The six-part drama is adapted from Scandinavian writer Mikael Niemi’s 2018 book of the same name (rendered in 2020 for an English audience). It follows the tribulations of a pastor (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his family when they arrive to start a new ministry within Kengis, a remote village in Sweden’s north, during the mid-19th century. In a place lacking many joys, not one of the inhabitants particularly warm to his strict approach to drinking and dancing, but it is his protection of impoverished people – especially the native Sami population, from among whom hails the pastor’s foster child Jussi (the young actor) – and his belief in social justice and equality that places him on a collision course against the Kengis powers that be.

The Opposing Forces

Soon collaborating opposing him are the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the fearsome factory proprietor the matron Sjödahl (Pernilla August), observed initially dismissing a newly injured worker with minimal compensation while he is still babbling upon seeing of his pulped hand, and anyone else who benefit from a community easily swayed with some containers of the whisky sold by the unsettling store owner the merchant Lindmark (the actor). However, in fairness, Lindmark’s creepiness pales when itinerant painter Beronius appears on the scene (Simon J Berger, providing an acting turn of rare unsettling intensity). If they are – like the pastor himself – only a little more than caricatures, they are at least potent archetypes.

Plot Progression

With the seeds of conflict planted, the moment arrives to get down with the storyline. The servant employed by the doctor, Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), accordingly vanishes in the forest. Indications of her flight and bear markings on a tree get discovered but she is completely absent. Gossip and fears of a man/maid-eating bear roaming the woods circulate, but the pastor has another theory that he and Jussi embark to prove.

An Odd Beast

To Cook a Bear is a somewhat peculiar show. It conjures a fine sense of the desolation that allows suspicion and prejudice and dark myths flourish from the native legend that bears might be dominated or possessed by the souls of humans. And it doesn’t romanticise the hardscrabble life led by the villagers, where brutality, be it from the wild or mankind, always looms at the periphery, waiting to erupt. But the characters seldom evolve more than ciphers – or maybe, while the conflicts amid fairness and revenge, logic and religion, virtue and evil escalate, emblematic figures within a moral tale – which stops the whole thing truly becoming immersive.

Tonal Inconsistencies

Additionally, exist numerous stylistically clashing instances where the clergyman’s skill to discover clues and discern Hilda’s fate turns almost risible. He stands looking at broken milk pots and strands of fur in hay barns as a fusion of the Belgian detective and Sherlock Holmes – with Jussi a rather hapless assistant figure (none of whom were required to taste a blend of blood spatter and saliva from his superior to agree that indeed, it was definitely coagulated blood on the site), prior to declaring his newest conclusion and pulling a body from a bog.

Opposing Goals

The village elite are bent on proving that the maid was killed by an animal, perhaps to preserve the peace, perhaps to protect one of their own. The clergyman is intent on establishing otherwise, and the proof so quickly stacks up supporting his view that again the show’s credibility and the viewer’s patience are tested. At its best, To Cook a Bear evokes memories of the adaptation some years back of the author’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the competing allures and terrors offered by science and religion. In its low points, it resembles Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Nevertheless, it does seem to offer the answer to that debated question: “Females, choose the animal.”

• The series is on Disney+ now.