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An heated debate recently spread widely across online platforms, following a user asked the question for females: would you rather find yourself stranded in a forest alongside a male or a bear? Like all the best hypothetical scenarios, it exposed wildly different worldviews and life encounters, illuminated chasms among genders, and could easily to induce an existential crisis if you thought on it extensively. There was also the predictable follow-up in which some males took to the internet to inform women how stupid they had been for choosing the bear and went on to limn the punishments they deserved for that choice. This at least allowed the women who were uncertain about their decision to decide with a new confidence.

Portraying the Scenario

To Cook a Bear effectively brings to life this nifty small premise. This six-episode drama is based from Scandinavian writer Mikael Niemi’s 2018 novel of the same name (translated in 2020 for English readers). It traces the tribulations of a clergyman (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his household when they arrive to begin a new ministry in Kengis, an isolated settlement in northern Sweden, during the mid-19th century. In a place with few pleasures, none of the locals particularly warm to his strict stance on alcohol and revelry, but it is his defense of the poor – especially the native Sami population, from among whom comes the pastor’s foster child Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in societal fairness and equal rights that sets him on a collision course with the Kengis powers that be.

The Antagonists

Soon in cahoots opposing him are the sheriff the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the intimidating mill owner Madam Sjödahl (Pernilla August), observed initially firing a recently mangled laborer with minimal compensation while he is still gibbering at the sight of his pulped hand, and all others who profit from a community who can be bought for a few bottles of the whisky provided by the creepy store owner Lindmark (the actor). However, in fairness, Lindmark’s eeriness pales when itinerant painter the artist Beronius appears in the story (the performer, delivering a performance of exceptional unsettling intensity). If they are – similar to the clergyman – only a little more than caricatures, they still serve as effective ones.

Narrative Development

Once the foundations of conflict planted, the moment arrives to proceed to narrative business. The servant from the doctor’s house, the character Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), duly goes missing in the forest. Signs of her escape and bear markings on a tree are found yet she remains completely absent. Rumours and anxieties of a man/maid-eating bear prowling the woods spread, but the pastor holds a different view which he and his ward set out to verify.

A Strange Creation

This Bear Drama is a slightly odd beast. It creates a strong impression of the desolation that lets suspicion and bias and dark myths thrive based on local folklore that bears might be dominated or possessed by the souls of humans. It avoids romanticise the hardscrabble life led by the villagers, in which brutality, be it from the wild or people, always looms on the edges, poised to explode. But the characters seldom evolve beyond symbols – or maybe, as the struggles amid fairness and revenge, rationality and religion, good and evil intensify, emblematic figures in a fable – which stops the entire production fully becoming immersive.

Stylistic Shifts

And then, exist numerous tonally jarring moments where the pastor’s ability in finding evidence and discern Hilda’s fate turns nearly laughable. He stands looking at broken milk pots and strands of fur within storage sheds like a combined the Belgian detective the English sleuth – with Jussi a rather hapless Hastings-cum-Watson (neither of whom were required to taste a blend of blood droplets and saliva from his superior to agree that, yes, it was clearly dried blood at the crime scene), prior to declaring his latest deduction and pulling a corpse out of a swamp.

Opposing Goals

The local leaders are bent on proving that the maid met her end by a bear, maybe to protect the peace, perhaps to protect a fellow elite. The pastor is intent on establishing the opposite, and the proof so quickly accumulates supporting his view that once more the drama’s plausibility and the viewer’s patience are tested. In its finest moments, 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 religion. At its worst, it resembles Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Still, it appears to provide the answer to that debated question: “Ladies, take the bear.”

• The series streams on Disney+ now.