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A heated debate recently went viral across online platforms, following a user asked the question to women: which would you prefer be lost in a forest with a man or a bear? Like all the best thought experiments, it revealed wildly different worldviews and life encounters, highlighted chasms between the sexes, and could easily cause a deep personal dilemma for anyone pondering about it for too long. Additionally, there came the predictable follow-up in which men of a certain stripe came online to tell females how stupid they were to select the animal and went on to describe the consequences they merited for it. This at minimum enabled those females who had been hesitating about their decision to make it with renewed assurance.

Portraying the Setup

To Cook a Bear effectively brings to life this nifty little setup. The six-part series is adapted on Swedish author Mikael Niemi’s 2018 novel of the same name (rendered in 2020 for an English audience). It traces the struggles of a clergyman (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his family when they arrive to begin a new ministry within Kengis, a remote settlement in Sweden’s north, during the mid-19th century. In a place with few pleasures, not one of the inhabitants particularly warm to his puritanical stance on alcohol and dancing, yet it is his defense of impoverished people – especially the indigenous Sami, from among whom comes the pastor’s foster child the youth Jussi (the young actor) – and his belief in societal fairness and equal rights that places him in direct opposition with the Kengis local authorities.

The Opposing Forces

Quickly collaborating against him are the lawman the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the fearsome factory proprietor the matron Sjödahl (the actress), seen early on dismissing a recently mangled worker with minimal compensation as he remains gibbering at the sight his crushed hand, and all others who profit from a community easily swayed with some containers of the whisky sold by the unsettling store owner the merchant Lindmark (the actor). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s eeriness pales when travelling artist Beronius arrives on the scene (Simon J Berger, providing a performance of rare discomfiting power). If they are – similar to the clergyman – just slightly beyond being stereotypes, they are at least potent archetypes.

Plot Progression

Once the foundations of tension planted, the moment arrives to proceed with the storyline. The servant employed by the doctor, the character Hilda (the actress), accordingly vanishes in the forest. Signs of her flight and bear markings on a tree are found yet she remains completely absent. Gossip and anxieties of a man/maid-eating bear roaming the woodland circulate, yet the clergyman has another theory which he and his ward embark to verify.

A Strange Creation

This Bear Drama is a somewhat odd beast. It conjures a strong impression of the desolation that lets distrust and prejudice and dark myths thrive based on local folklore that bears might be dominated or possessed by the spirits of men. And it doesn’t idealising the hardscrabble life experienced by the villagers, where violence, whether that of the wild or people, always looms at the periphery, waiting to erupt. Yet the personas rarely become beyond symbols – or perhaps, while the conflicts amid fairness and vengeance, logic and faith, virtue and wickedness escalate, representative characters within a moral tale – preventing the entire production fully coming to life.

Tonal Inconsistencies

Additionally, exist numerous tonally jarring moments in which the pastor’s ability to discover clues and determine Hilda’s fate becomes almost risible. He positions himself observing broken milk pots and strands of fur in hay barns like a combined the Belgian detective the English sleuth – with Jussi a particularly unfortunate assistant figure (neither of whom were required to taste a mixture of blood droplets and saliva from his superior to agree that, yes, it was clearly coagulated blood on the site), before announcing his latest deduction and pulling a corpse out of a swamp.

Clashing Agendas

The local leaders are bent on demonstrating that the maid met her end by a bear, perhaps to protect the peace, or possibly to shield one of their own. The clergyman is intent on establishing otherwise, and the evidence so rapidly stacks up in his favour that once more the drama’s plausibility and the viewer’s patience are tested. At its best, To Cook a Bear 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 presented by science and belief. At its worst, it resembles a bear-themed police procedural. Still, it appears to provide the response to the earlier query: “Ladies, take the bear.”

• To Cook a Bear is on Disney+ now.