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A heated debate recently went viral on social media, after someone posed a query for females: would you rather be lost in the woods alongside a male or a bear? Like all the best thought experiments, it exposed vastly opposing worldviews and experiences, illuminated chasms between the sexes, and could easily cause an existential crisis if you thought about it for too long. There was also the predictable follow-up in which men of a certain stripe came online to inform females how stupid they were for choosing the bear and went on to limn the punishments they deserved for it. This at least enabled the women who had been hesitating about their decision to make it with a new confidence.

Dramatising the Scenario

The Bear-Cooking Tale effectively dramatises this clever little setup. The six-part drama is based on Scandinavian writer the novelist’s 2018 novel of the same name (rendered two years later for English readers). It follows the struggles of a pastor (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his family when they arrive to start a fresh religious post in Kengis, a remote settlement in Sweden’s north, during the mid-19th century. In a place lacking many joys, none of the inhabitants particularly warm to his strict stance on alcohol and dancing, but it is his protection of impoverished people – especially the indigenous Sami, from among whom comes the pastor’s adopted son Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his conviction in societal fairness and equal rights that places him in direct opposition with the Kengis local authorities.

The Opposing Forces

Soon in cahoots opposing him include the lawman Brahe (the performer), the intimidating mill owner Madam Sjödahl (Pernilla August), seen early on firing a recently mangled laborer with minimal compensation while he is still babbling at the sight of his pulped hand, and all others who benefit from a community who can be bought with some containers of the whisky provided by the creepy shopkeeper Lindmark (the actor). However, in fairness, Lindmark’s eeriness diminishes when itinerant painter Beronius arrives in the story (the performer, providing an acting turn of exceptional unsettling intensity). While they remain – like the pastor himself – just slightly beyond than caricatures, they still serve as effective ones.

Plot Progression

Once the foundations of tension planted, the moment arrives to get down to narrative business. The maid from the doctor’s house, the character Hilda (the actress), accordingly vanishes from the woods. Indications of her flight and bear markings on a tree are found yet she remains completely absent. Rumours and anxieties regarding a human-devouring bear prowling the woods circulate, but the pastor holds a different view which he and his ward embark to verify.

An Odd Beast

To Cook a Bear is a somewhat peculiar show. It creates a fine sense of the bleakness that allows distrust and prejudice and grim legends thrive from the native legend that animals can be controlled or possessed by the spirits of men. And it doesn’t idealising the hardscrabble life experienced by the residents, where violence, be it from nature or mankind, lurks constantly at the periphery, poised to explode. But the characters rarely become beyond symbols – or maybe, while the conflicts between justice and vengeance, logic and faith, virtue and wickedness intensify, representative characters in a fable – preventing the entire production truly becoming immersive.

Tonal Inconsistencies

Additionally, exist numerous tonally jarring moments in which the pastor’s ability to discover clues and determine Hilda’s fate becomes nearly laughable. He positions himself looking at shattered containers and strands of fur in hay barns like a combined the Belgian detective the English sleuth – alongside Jussi a rather hapless Hastings-cum-Watson (neither of whom had to taste a blend of blood droplets and saliva from his superior to agree that indeed, it was definitely coagulated blood on the site), prior to declaring his latest deduction and pulling a corpse from a bog.

Clashing Agendas

The local leaders are bent on demonstrating that Hilda met her end by a bear, perhaps to protect the peace, perhaps to protect one of their own. The clergyman is intent on establishing the opposite, and the evidence so quickly 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 adaptation some years back of the author’s the serpent tale, with its evocation of the opposing attractions and fears offered by rational thought and religion. At its worst, it resembles a bear-themed police procedural. Nevertheless, it appears to provide the response to that debated question: “Females, choose the animal.”

• To Cook a Bear is on Disney+ currently.