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An heated discussion recently went viral on social media, after someone posed the question to women: would you rather be lost in the woods with a man or with a bear? Like all the most engaging thought experiments, it exposed wildly different perspectives and life encounters, highlighted chasms among genders, and was likely to induce an existential crisis for anyone pondering on it extensively. There was also the predictable coda where some males came online to tell women how stupid they had been to select the animal and went on to limn the punishments they deserved for it. This at minimum enabled those females who had been hesitating over their choice to decide with renewed assurance.

Dramatising the Scenario

The Bear-Cooking Tale effectively brings to life this clever small premise. The six-part drama is adapted from Scandinavian writer the novelist’s 2018 book of the same name (rendered two years later for English readers). It traces the tribulations of a pastor (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his family when they arrive to begin a new ministry within Kengis, a remote settlement in northern Sweden, during the mid-19th century. Within a community with few pleasures, not one of the inhabitants particularly appreciate his strict stance on drinking and revelry, yet it is his protection of impoverished people – especially the indigenous Sami, from among whom comes the pastor’s foster child the youth Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his conviction in social justice and equality that sets him in direct opposition against the Kengis local authorities.

The Opposing Forces

Quickly collaborating opposing him include the lawman Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the fearsome factory proprietor the matron Sjödahl (the actress), observed early on dismissing a newly injured worker with a month’s pay as he remains babbling upon seeing of his pulped hand, and anyone else who benefit from a community who can be bought for a few bottles of liquor sold by the creepy store owner the merchant Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). However, in fairness, Lindmark’s eeriness pales when itinerant painter the artist Beronius arrives on the scene (the performer, delivering a performance of rare unsettling intensity). If they are – similar to the clergyman – only a little more than caricatures, they still serve as potent archetypes.

Plot Progression

With the seeds of tension sown, the moment arrives to proceed to narrative business. The servant employed by the doctor, Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), duly goes missing from the woods. Indications of her escape and bear markings on a tree are found but she is completely absent. Rumours and anxieties regarding a human-devouring bear prowling the woods spread, but the pastor holds a different view that he and Jussi set out to prove.

A Strange Creation

This Bear Drama is a slightly odd beast. It creates a fine sense of the bleakness that lets distrust and prejudice and dark myths thrive based on local folklore that animals might be dominated or possessed by the spirits of humans. And it doesn’t idealising the hardscrabble life experienced by the villagers, where violence, be it from the wild or people, always looms at the periphery, poised to explode. Yet the personas seldom evolve more than ciphers – or maybe, as the struggles amid fairness and revenge, logic and religion, virtue and wickedness intensify, emblematic figures in a fable – which stops the whole thing truly coming to life.

Stylistic Shifts

Additionally, there are the many tonally jarring instances in which the pastor’s ability in finding evidence and determine the maid’s destiny turns nearly laughable. He positions himself looking at broken milk pots and clumps of hair in hay barns as a fusion of the Belgian detective the English sleuth – with Jussi a rather hapless assistant figure (none of whom had to taste a mixture of blood spatter and saliva from his superior to confirm that indeed, it was clearly coagulated blood on the site), before announcing his newest conclusion and extracting a body from a bog.

Opposing Goals

The village elite are determined demonstrating that the maid met her end by a bear, perhaps to preserve the peace, perhaps to protect one of their own. The pastor is bent on proving otherwise, and the evidence so quickly accumulates in his favour that again the drama’s plausibility and audience tolerance get strained. In its finest moments, To Cook a Bear is reminiscent of the adaptation some years back of Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, through its portrayal of the opposing attractions and fears offered by rational thought and belief. In its low points, it resembles Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Nevertheless, it appears to offer the answer to that debated question: “Ladies, take the bear.”

• To Cook a Bear is on Disney+ currently.