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An heated discussion recently spread widely on social media, following someone posed a query for females: would you rather be lost in a forest with a man or with a bear? Like all the most engaging hypothetical scenarios, it revealed vastly opposing worldviews and life encounters, highlighted chasms between the sexes, and could easily cause an existential crisis for anyone pondering about it extensively. There was also the predictable follow-up in which some males came online to tell women how stupid they were for choosing the bear and went on to describe the punishments they merited for it. This at least allowed the women who were uncertain over their choice to make it with a new confidence.

Portraying the Setup

To Cook a Bear skillfully brings to life this clever little setup. The six-part series is based on Swedish author Mikael Niemi’s 2018 book with the identical title (translated in 2020 for an English audience). It traces the struggles of a pastor (the lead actor) and his household as they come to begin a fresh religious post in Kengis, an isolated village in northern Sweden, in 1852. Within a community with few pleasures, not one of the inhabitants particularly warm to his puritanical stance on drinking and dancing, but it is his protection of impoverished people – especially the indigenous Sami, from among whom comes the pastor’s adopted son the youth Jussi (the young actor) – and his conviction in social justice and equality that sets him in direct opposition against the Kengis local authorities.

The Antagonists

Soon collaborating against him include the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the fearsome factory proprietor the matron Sjödahl (the actress), seen early on 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 who can be bought with some containers of liquor provided by the unsettling store owner Lindmark (the actor). Although, to be fair, Lindmark’s creepiness pales once itinerant painter the artist Beronius arrives in the story (the performer, providing an acting turn of rare unsettling intensity). If they are – similar to the clergyman – only a little more being stereotypes, they still serve as potent archetypes.

Plot Progression

Once the foundations of conflict sown, it is time to get down with the storyline. The maid from the doctor’s house, the character Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), accordingly goes missing from the woods. Signs of her flight and bear markings upon a trunk get discovered but she is nowhere to be seen. Gossip and anxieties of a man/maid-eating bear roaming the woods spread, but the pastor has another theory that he and Jussi embark to prove.

A Strange Creation

To Cook a Bear is a somewhat peculiar show. It conjures a strong impression 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 men. It avoids romanticise the tough existence led by the residents, in which brutality, whether that of nature or mankind, lurks constantly on the edges, poised to explode. But the characters seldom evolve more than ciphers – or maybe, while the conflicts between justice and vengeance, logic and religion, virtue and evil intensify, emblematic figures in a fable – preventing the whole thing fully becoming immersive.

Tonal Inconsistencies

And then, there are numerous stylistically clashing instances where the clergyman’s skill to discover clues and determine Hilda’s fate turns almost risible. He positions himself observing broken milk pots and strands of fur in hay barns like a combined the Belgian detective the English sleuth – alongside Jussi a rather hapless Hastings-cum-Watson (neither of whom had to taste a mixture of blood droplets and saliva from his superior to confirm that, yes, it was clearly dried blood on the site), before announcing his newest conclusion and pulling a corpse from a bog.

Opposing Goals

The local leaders are determined demonstrating that the maid met her end by a bear, perhaps to protect the calm, perhaps to shield a fellow elite. The pastor is bent on establishing otherwise, and the evidence so rapidly stacks up in his favour that again the drama’s plausibility and audience tolerance 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 attractions and fears offered by science and religion. In its low points, it’s more like a bear-themed police procedural. Nevertheless, it appears to provide the response to that debated question: “Females, choose the animal.”

• To Cook a Bear is on Disney+ currently.