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A heated discussion lately spread widely across online platforms, after someone posed the question for females: which would you prefer be lost in the woods alongside a male or a bear? Like all the best hypothetical scenarios, it revealed wildly different worldviews and experiences, illuminated divides between the sexes, and was likely cause an existential crisis if you thought on it for too long. Additionally, there came the almost inevitable follow-up in which men of a certain stripe came online to inform females how foolish they were for choosing the bear and proceeded to describe the consequences they merited for it. This at least allowed those females who were uncertain about their decision to decide with a new confidence.

Portraying the Scenario

To Cook a Bear effectively dramatises this clever small premise. The six-part series is based on Scandinavian writer the novelist’s 2018 novel with the identical title (rendered in 2020 for an English audience). It follows the tribulations of a pastor (the lead actor) 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 locals particularly warm to his puritanical approach to alcohol and dancing, but it is his protection of impoverished people – particularly the indigenous Sami, from among whom comes the preacher’s adopted son Jussi (the young actor) – and his belief in societal fairness and equal rights that sets him on a collision course with the Kengis local authorities.

The Antagonists

Soon collaborating opposing him include the lawman the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the fearsome mill owner Madam Sjödahl (Pernilla August), observed initially dismissing a newly injured laborer with a month’s pay while he is still gibbering upon seeing of his pulped hand, and anyone else who benefit from a populace easily swayed with some containers of the whisky sold by the creepy shopkeeper Lindmark (the actor). Although, in fairness, Lindmark’s eeriness pales once itinerant painter the artist Beronius appears in the story (Simon J Berger, providing an acting turn of exceptional discomfiting power). While they remain – similar to the clergyman – only a little more than caricatures, they are at least potent archetypes.

Plot Progression

With the seeds of tension planted, the moment arrives to proceed to narrative business. The servant from the doctor’s house, the character Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), duly vanishes in the forest. Indications of her flight and animal scratches on a tree get discovered yet she remains nowhere to be seen. Rumours and fears of a man/maid-eating beast prowling the woodland spread, but the pastor holds a different view which he and his ward set out to prove.

An Odd Beast

This Bear Drama is a somewhat peculiar show. It creates a fine sense of the desolation that lets distrust and prejudice and dark myths thrive based on local folklore that animals might be dominated or possessed by the spirits of humans. And it doesn’t romanticise the tough existence led by the villagers, where brutality, be it from the wild or mankind, lurks constantly on the edges, poised to explode. Yet the personas rarely become more than ciphers – or maybe, as the struggles amid fairness and vengeance, rationality and faith, virtue and evil escalate, emblematic figures within a moral tale – which stops the entire production truly coming to life.

Stylistic Shifts

And then, exist numerous tonally jarring moments where the clergyman’s skill to discover clues and discern Hilda’s fate becomes almost risible. He positions himself looking at broken milk pots and strands of fur in hay barns as a fusion of the Belgian detective the English sleuth – alongside Jussi a particularly unfortunate Hastings-cum-Watson (none of whom had to lick a blend of blood droplets and the boss’s spit to confirm that indeed, it was definitely dried blood at the crime scene), before announcing his newest conclusion and extracting a corpse from a bog.

Opposing Goals

The local leaders are bent on demonstrating that Hilda was killed by a bear, perhaps to preserve the peace, or possibly to shield one of their own. The clergyman is intent on proving otherwise, and the evidence so quickly stacks up in his favour that once more the show’s credibility and the viewer’s patience get strained. In its finest moments, the series evokes memories of the adaptation a few years ago of Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the opposing allures and fears presented by rational thought and religion. At its worst, it resembles a bear-themed police procedural. Still, it appears to provide the response to the earlier query: “Females, choose the animal.”

• To Cook a Bear is on Disney+ now.