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An intense debate lately went viral on social media, following someone asked the question for females: which would you prefer 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 a deep personal dilemma if you thought on it for too long. There was also the predictable coda where men of a certain stripe came online to tell women how stupid they had been for choosing the animal and proceeded to describe the punishments they deserved for it. This at minimum enabled those females who were uncertain about their decision to make it with a new confidence.

Dramatising the Setup

The Bear-Cooking Tale effectively dramatises this clever little setup. This six-episode drama is adapted from Swedish author the novelist’s 2018 novel with the identical title (rendered in 2020 for English readers). It traces the tribulations of a pastor (the lead actor) and his household when they arrive to begin a fresh religious post within Kengis, a remote settlement in Sweden’s north, during the mid-19th century. In a place with few pleasures, not one of the locals especially warm to his puritanical approach to alcohol and dancing, yet it is his defense of impoverished people – especially the indigenous Sami, from which hails the preacher’s adopted son the youth Jussi (the young actor) – and his belief in social justice and equality that places him on a collision course with the Kengis powers that be.

The Antagonists

Soon collaborating against him are the lawman Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the fearsome factory proprietor the matron Sjödahl (Pernilla August), observed initially dismissing 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 populace easily swayed for a few bottles of the whisky sold by the unsettling shopkeeper Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). Although, in fairness, Lindmark’s creepiness diminishes once itinerant painter the artist Beronius appears in the story (the performer, providing a performance of rare unsettling intensity). While they remain – similar to the clergyman – only a little more than caricatures, they still serve as potent archetypes.

Plot Progression

Once the foundations of tension planted, it is time to get down with the storyline. The maid from the doctor’s house, the character Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), duly vanishes from the woods. Signs of her escape and bear markings upon a trunk are found yet she remains completely absent. Rumours and fears regarding a human-devouring bear prowling the woodland spread, but the pastor holds a different view that he and Jussi set out to prove.

A Strange Creation

This Bear Drama is a somewhat peculiar show. It creates a strong impression of the desolation that allows distrust and prejudice and grim legends flourish based on local folklore that animals can be controlled or possessed by the souls of humans. It avoids idealising the hardscrabble life led by the villagers, where violence, be it from nature or mankind, always looms on the edges, waiting to erupt. But the characters seldom evolve beyond symbols – or maybe, while the conflicts amid fairness and vengeance, rationality and religion, virtue and evil escalate, emblematic figures within a moral tale – which stops the entire production fully becoming immersive.

Stylistic Shifts

And then, exist the many stylistically clashing instances in which the clergyman’s skill to discover clues and discern the maid’s destiny turns nearly laughable. He positions himself observing broken milk pots and clumps of hair within storage sheds like a combined Hercule Poirot the English sleuth – alongside Jussi a particularly unfortunate assistant figure (neither of whom were required to taste a blend of blood droplets and the boss’s spit to confirm that indeed, it was clearly coagulated blood at the crime scene), before announcing his latest deduction and pulling a body out of a swamp.

Opposing Goals

The village elite are bent on proving that Hilda met her end by an animal, maybe to preserve the calm, perhaps to shield one of their own. The clergyman is bent on proving otherwise, and the evidence so rapidly accumulates supporting his view that once more the drama’s plausibility and the viewer’s patience are tested. At its best, To Cook a Bear evokes memories of the TV version a few years ago of Sarah Perry’s the serpent tale, through its portrayal of the competing attractions and terrors offered by rational thought and religion. In its low points, it’s more like a bear-themed police procedural. Nevertheless, it does seem to offer the answer to that debated question: “Ladies, take the bear.”

• To Cook a Bear streams on Disney+ now.