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An heated debate recently spread widely across online platforms, following a user posed a query to women: which would you prefer find yourself stranded in the woods alongside a male or a bear? Like all the best hypothetical scenarios, it revealed wildly different perspectives and life encounters, highlighted divides among genders, and could easily cause an existential crisis for anyone pondering about it for too long. There was also the predictable follow-up where men of a certain stripe took to the internet to inform females how foolish they had been to select the animal and proceeded to describe the punishments they merited for that choice. This at minimum allowed those females who had been hesitating over their choice to make it with renewed assurance.

Dramatising the Scenario

The Bear-Cooking Tale effectively dramatises this nifty little setup. This six-episode drama is based from Scandinavian writer the novelist’s 2018 novel with the identical title (translated in 2020 for an English audience). It traces the tribulations of a clergyman (the lead actor) and his household when they arrive to begin a fresh religious post within Kengis, an isolated village in Sweden’s north, during the mid-19th century. In a place lacking many joys, not one of the inhabitants especially warm to his strict stance on alcohol and dancing, yet it is his protection of impoverished people – especially the indigenous Sami, from among whom comes the preacher’s adopted son Jussi (the young actor) – and his belief in social justice and equal rights that places him in direct opposition with the Kengis local authorities.

The Antagonists

Quickly collaborating against him are the lawman Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the intimidating factory proprietor the matron Sjödahl (the actress), seen initially dismissing a recently mangled laborer with a month’s pay while he is still gibbering upon seeing of his pulped hand, and all others who profit from a populace easily swayed for a few bottles of liquor sold by the creepy store owner the merchant Lindmark (the actor). Although, to be fair, Lindmark’s eeriness diminishes when travelling artist Beronius arrives on the scene (Simon J Berger, delivering an acting turn of exceptional unsettling intensity). While they remain – similar to the clergyman – only a little more than caricatures, they are at least potent archetypes.

Narrative Development

Once the foundations of tension sown, it is time to get down to narrative business. The servant employed by the doctor, the character Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), accordingly vanishes from the woods. Signs of her flight and bear markings upon a trunk get discovered but she is completely absent. Gossip and fears regarding a human-devouring bear prowling the woodland spread, but the pastor has another theory that he and Jussi set out to prove.

An Odd Beast

This Bear Drama is a somewhat peculiar show. It conjures a strong impression of the bleakness that lets distrust and bias and dark myths flourish based on local folklore that bears can be controlled or inhabited by the spirits of men. It avoids romanticise the tough existence led by the residents, where violence, be it from the wild or mankind, lurks constantly at the periphery, waiting to erupt. But the characters rarely become beyond symbols – or perhaps, as the struggles amid fairness and revenge, rationality and religion, virtue and evil intensify, emblematic figures in a fable – which stops the whole thing truly becoming immersive.

Stylistic Shifts

And then, there are the many tonally jarring moments in which the pastor’s ability to discover clues and discern Hilda’s fate becomes almost risible. He positions himself observing broken milk pots and clumps of hair within storage sheds like a combined the Belgian detective the English sleuth – with Jussi a rather hapless Hastings-cum-Watson (neither of whom had to lick a blend of blood spatter and the boss’s spit to agree that, yes, it was definitely coagulated blood at the crime scene), before announcing his latest deduction and extracting a corpse from a bog.

Opposing Goals

The local leaders are bent on demonstrating that Hilda met her end by a bear, perhaps to protect the calm, or possibly to protect a fellow elite. The pastor is bent on establishing otherwise, and the evidence so rapidly accumulates in his favour that again the drama’s plausibility and the viewer’s patience get strained. At its best, To Cook a Bear evokes memories of the TV version some years back of Sarah Perry’s the serpent tale, with its evocation of the competing allures and terrors offered by science and belief. In its low points, it’s more like a bear-themed police procedural. Nevertheless, it does seem to offer the response to that debated question: “Females, choose the animal.”

• To Cook a Bear streams on Disney+ currently.