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A heated discussion lately spread widely on social media, after a user posed the question for females: would you rather find yourself stranded in the woods alongside a male or with a bear? Like all the most engaging hypothetical scenarios, it revealed vastly opposing worldviews and experiences, illuminated divides between the sexes, and could easily cause an existential crisis for anyone pondering about it extensively. Additionally, there came the predictable coda in which men of a certain stripe came online to inform females how foolish they were to select the bear and proceeded to describe the punishments they merited for it. This at minimum enabled those females who were uncertain about their decision to decide with a new confidence.

Portraying the Setup

The Bear-Cooking Tale skillfully dramatises this nifty small premise. This six-episode drama is based on Swedish author the novelist’s 2018 novel of the same name (rendered in 2020 for English readers). It traces the struggles of a pastor (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his household as they come 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, none of the locals especially warm to his puritanical stance on drinking and revelry, but it is his protection of impoverished people – particularly the indigenous Sami, from which hails the preacher’s adopted son Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in societal fairness and equality that places him on a collision course against the Kengis local authorities.

The Opposing Forces

Quickly in cahoots opposing him are the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the intimidating factory proprietor Madam Sjödahl (Pernilla August), seen initially dismissing a recently mangled worker with minimal compensation while he is still babbling upon seeing of his pulped hand, and all others who profit from a community easily swayed for a few bottles of liquor provided by the creepy shopkeeper the merchant Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). However, in fairness, Lindmark’s creepiness pales when travelling artist the artist Beronius arrives in the story (Simon J Berger, providing a performance of rare discomfiting power). While they remain – like the pastor himself – only a little more than caricatures, they still serve as effective ones.

Plot Progression

Once the foundations of conflict planted, the moment arrives to proceed with the storyline. The maid employed by the doctor, the character Hilda (the actress), accordingly goes missing in the forest. Signs of her escape and animal scratches on a tree get discovered but she is nowhere to be seen. Rumours and anxieties regarding a human-devouring beast roaming the woods spread, yet the clergyman has another theory that he and Jussi set out to verify.

A Strange Creation

This Bear Drama is a somewhat odd beast. It creates a fine sense of the bleakness that allows distrust and prejudice and grim legends flourish from the native legend that animals can be controlled or inhabited by the souls of men. It avoids romanticise the hardscrabble life experienced by the villagers, in which brutality, whether that of nature or people, lurks constantly at the periphery, poised to explode. But the characters rarely become more than ciphers – or maybe, as the struggles amid fairness and revenge, rationality and religion, good and evil escalate, emblematic figures in a fable – which stops the whole thing fully becoming immersive.

Stylistic Shifts

Additionally, exist numerous tonally jarring instances in which the clergyman’s skill in finding evidence and discern the maid’s destiny turns nearly laughable. He positions himself looking at shattered containers and clumps of hair within storage sheds like a combined Hercule Poirot the English sleuth – with Jussi a particularly unfortunate assistant figure (none of whom had to lick a mixture of blood droplets and saliva from his superior to confirm that indeed, it was definitely dried blood on the site), before announcing his latest deduction and extracting a corpse from a bog.

Opposing Goals

The local leaders are determined proving that Hilda was killed by an animal, maybe to preserve the peace, perhaps to shield a fellow elite. The clergyman is intent on proving the opposite, and the proof so rapidly accumulates supporting his view that once more the show’s credibility and audience tolerance are tested. In its finest moments, To Cook a Bear evokes memories of the TV version some years back of Sarah Perry’s the serpent tale, through its portrayal of the competing attractions and fears offered by rational thought and religion. In its low points, it resembles Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Nevertheless, it does seem to provide the response to the earlier query: “Ladies, take the bear.”

• The series streams on Disney+ currently.