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An intense discussion lately spread widely on social media, after someone asked a query for females: which would you prefer find yourself stranded in a forest alongside a male or a bear? Like all the best hypothetical scenarios, it revealed wildly different perspectives and life encounters, illuminated divides between the sexes, and could easily cause an existential crisis for anyone pondering about it for too long. Additionally, there came the almost inevitable coda in which men of a certain stripe took to the internet to tell women how foolish they had been for choosing the animal and proceeded to limn the punishments they deserved for it. This at minimum enabled those females who were uncertain about their decision to decide with renewed assurance.

Dramatising the Setup

The Bear-Cooking Tale skillfully brings to life this clever small premise. The six-part drama is adapted on Swedish author Mikael Niemi’s 2018 novel of the same name (rendered in 2020 for English readers). It traces the tribulations of a clergyman (the lead actor) and his family when they arrive to start a fresh religious post in Kengis, an isolated settlement in Sweden’s north, in 1852. In a place with few pleasures, none of the locals especially appreciate his puritanical approach to drinking and revelry, but it is his protection of impoverished people – particularly the native Sami population, from which comes the preacher’s adopted son Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his conviction in social justice and equal rights that places him in direct opposition with the Kengis powers that be.

The Opposing Forces

Quickly collaborating opposing him include the lawman Brahe (the performer), the fearsome mill owner Madam Sjödahl (Pernilla August), observed early on firing a newly injured worker with minimal compensation as he remains babbling at the sight of his pulped hand, and anyone else who profit from a populace easily swayed for a few bottles of liquor provided by the unsettling shopkeeper Lindmark (the actor). However, in fairness, Lindmark’s eeriness diminishes once travelling artist the artist Beronius appears in the story (the performer, delivering 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

With the seeds of conflict planted, the moment arrives to proceed to narrative business. The maid from the doctor’s house, the character Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), accordingly goes missing in the forest. Indications of her escape and animal scratches upon a trunk are found yet she remains completely absent. Gossip and anxieties of a man/maid-eating beast roaming the woodland circulate, yet the clergyman holds a different view that he and Jussi set out to verify.

An Odd Beast

To Cook a Bear is a slightly peculiar show. It creates a fine sense of the bleakness that allows distrust and bias and grim legends thrive from the native legend that animals can be controlled or inhabited by the souls of humans. It avoids idealising the hardscrabble life led by the villagers, where brutality, whether that of the wild or mankind, always looms on the edges, poised to explode. Yet the personas seldom evolve more than ciphers – or perhaps, as the struggles amid fairness and revenge, logic and faith, good and evil escalate, representative characters in a fable – preventing the entire production fully becoming immersive.

Tonal Inconsistencies

And then, there are the many stylistically clashing moments in which the pastor’s ability to discover clues and determine the maid’s destiny becomes almost risible. He positions himself observing shattered containers and clumps of hair in hay barns like a combined Hercule Poirot the English sleuth – with Jussi a particularly unfortunate Hastings-cum-Watson (neither of whom were required to lick a mixture of blood spatter and the boss’s spit to agree that, yes, it was definitely dried blood at the crime scene), before announcing his latest deduction and extracting a body out of a swamp.

Opposing Goals

The village elite are bent on proving that the maid met her end by a bear, maybe to preserve the calm, perhaps to shield one of their own. The clergyman is intent on establishing otherwise, and the evidence so rapidly stacks up supporting his view that once more the show’s credibility and the viewer’s patience get strained. At its best, the series evokes memories of the TV version a few years ago of the author’s the serpent tale, through its portrayal of the competing attractions and fears offered by science and religion. At its worst, it’s more like Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Nevertheless, it appears to provide the response to that debated question: “Ladies, take the bear.”

• The series is on Disney+ currently.