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A heated discussion lately went viral across online platforms, after someone posed the question to women: would you rather be lost in the woods alongside a male or a bear? Like all the best hypothetical scenarios, it exposed wildly different perspectives and experiences, highlighted chasms among genders, and could easily to induce an existential crisis for anyone pondering about it extensively. Additionally, there came the almost inevitable coda in which men of a certain stripe came online to inform females how foolish they were to select the animal and went on to limn the consequences they deserved for it. This at minimum enabled those females who were uncertain over their choice to decide with a new confidence.

Dramatising the Scenario

The Bear-Cooking Tale effectively dramatises this clever little setup. This six-episode series is based on Scandinavian writer Mikael Niemi’s 2018 novel of the same name (rendered in 2020 for an English audience). It traces the tribulations of a pastor (the lead actor) and his family as they come to start a new ministry within Kengis, an isolated settlement in Sweden’s north, in 1852. In a place lacking many joys, not one of the inhabitants particularly appreciate his puritanical stance on alcohol and dancing, but it is his defense of impoverished people – especially the indigenous Sami, from among whom comes the pastor’s adopted son the youth Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his conviction in social justice and equality that places him in direct opposition against the Kengis powers that be.

The Opposing Forces

Quickly in cahoots against him include the sheriff the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the fearsome mill owner Madam Sjödahl (the actress), seen early on firing a recently mangled laborer with minimal compensation while he is still babbling upon seeing of his pulped hand, and anyone else who profit from a populace easily swayed with some containers of the whisky sold by the unsettling shopkeeper the merchant Lindmark (the actor). Although, in fairness, Lindmark’s creepiness diminishes when itinerant painter Beronius arrives on the scene (Simon J Berger, delivering 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.

Plot Progression

Once the foundations of tension planted, it is time to proceed to narrative business. The maid from the doctor’s house, Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), duly vanishes from the woods. Signs of her escape and bear markings on a tree get discovered but she is completely absent. Rumours and fears regarding a human-devouring bear roaming the woods spread, yet the clergyman has another theory which he and his ward set out to prove.

A Strange Creation

To Cook a Bear is a slightly odd beast. It creates a fine sense of the desolation that lets suspicion and bias and dark myths thrive from the native legend that animals might be dominated or possessed by the spirits of men. And it doesn’t romanticise the tough existence led by the residents, in which brutality, be it from the wild or mankind, always looms on the edges, poised to explode. But the characters rarely become more than ciphers – or maybe, while the conflicts amid fairness and revenge, rationality and faith, virtue and wickedness intensify, representative characters within a moral tale – preventing the entire production fully becoming immersive.

Stylistic Shifts

And then, exist the many tonally jarring moments where the clergyman’s skill to discover clues and determine Hilda’s fate becomes almost risible. He positions himself looking at broken milk pots and strands of fur in hay barns like a combined Hercule Poirot and Sherlock Holmes – alongside Jussi a rather hapless assistant figure (neither of whom were required to lick a blend of blood droplets and the boss’s spit to agree that, yes, it was clearly coagulated blood on the site), before announcing his latest deduction and pulling a body from a bog.

Clashing Agendas

The village elite are determined demonstrating that the maid was killed by an animal, maybe to protect the peace, or possibly to protect one of their own. The clergyman is intent on establishing the opposite, and the evidence so rapidly accumulates in his favour that once more the show’s credibility and the viewer’s patience get strained. In its finest moments, the series is reminiscent of the TV version a few years ago of the author’s the serpent tale, with its evocation of the competing attractions and terrors offered by science and belief. At its worst, it’s more like a bear-themed police procedural. Nevertheless, it appears to provide the response to the earlier query: “Ladies, take the bear.”

• The series is on Disney+ now.