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An intense discussion recently spread widely across online platforms, after someone asked the question to women: would you rather be lost in a forest with a man or a bear? Similar to the best hypothetical scenarios, it exposed wildly different worldviews and experiences, highlighted divides between the sexes, and could easily to induce an existential crisis for anyone pondering about it for too long. There was also the predictable follow-up in which some males came online to tell women how foolish they had been to select the bear and went on to describe the consequences they deserved for that choice. This at least enabled the women who had been hesitating over their choice to decide with renewed assurance.

Dramatising the Scenario

The Bear-Cooking Tale effectively brings to life this nifty small premise. This six-episode series is adapted on Scandinavian writer Mikael Niemi’s 2018 book of the same name (translated two years later for English readers). It traces the struggles of a clergyman (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his household as they come to begin a fresh religious post within Kengis, an isolated village in Sweden’s north, in 1852. In a place lacking many joys, not one of the inhabitants especially appreciate his strict stance on alcohol and dancing, yet it is his protection of impoverished people – particularly the indigenous Sami, from among whom hails the pastor’s foster child Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his conviction in social justice and equality that places him on a collision course with the Kengis local authorities.

The Opposing Forces

Quickly in cahoots opposing him are the lawman the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the intimidating factory proprietor Madam Sjödahl (Pernilla August), observed early on firing a newly injured worker with a month’s pay while he is still babbling upon seeing of his pulped hand, and anyone else who profit from a populace who can be bought with some containers of liquor provided by the unsettling shopkeeper the merchant Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s eeriness diminishes when itinerant painter the artist Beronius appears on the scene (the performer, providing an acting turn of rare unsettling intensity). While they remain – similar to the clergyman – only a little more being stereotypes, they are at least potent archetypes.

Plot Progression

With the seeds of tension sown, the moment arrives to proceed to narrative business. The servant from the doctor’s house, Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), accordingly vanishes in the forest. Signs of her escape and animal scratches upon a trunk are found yet she remains completely absent. Gossip and anxieties regarding a human-devouring bear prowling the woodland spread, but the pastor has another theory that he and Jussi set out to prove.

A Strange Creation

To Cook a Bear is a somewhat peculiar show. It creates a fine sense of the desolation that allows distrust and bias and grim legends flourish from the native legend that animals might be dominated or inhabited by the spirits of men. It avoids idealising the hardscrabble life led by the villagers, in which brutality, be it from the wild or mankind, lurks constantly at the periphery, poised to explode. Yet the personas seldom evolve beyond symbols – or maybe, while the conflicts amid fairness and vengeance, rationality and faith, virtue and evil escalate, emblematic figures within a moral tale – which stops the entire production fully coming to life.

Tonal Inconsistencies

Additionally, exist the many tonally jarring instances in which the clergyman’s skill to discover clues and determine the maid’s destiny becomes almost risible. He stands observing broken milk pots and strands of fur in hay barns like a combined Hercule Poirot the English sleuth – alongside Jussi a particularly unfortunate assistant figure (none of whom had to lick a mixture of blood droplets and saliva from his superior to confirm that indeed, it was clearly dried blood on the site), before announcing his newest conclusion and extracting a corpse from a bog.

Opposing Goals

The village elite are determined demonstrating that the maid was killed by a bear, maybe to preserve the peace, perhaps to protect one of their own. The pastor is bent on establishing the opposite, and the proof so quickly accumulates in his favour that again the show’s credibility and audience tolerance are tested. In its finest moments, the series is reminiscent of the adaptation a few years ago of Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the opposing attractions and fears presented by rational thought and belief. In its low points, it resembles a bear-themed police procedural. Still, it appears to provide the response to the earlier query: “Females, choose the animal.”

• The series is on Disney+ now.