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A heated debate recently spread widely across online platforms, after someone posed the question to women: would you rather be lost in a forest alongside a male or a bear? Like all the most engaging hypothetical scenarios, it exposed vastly opposing worldviews and life encounters, highlighted chasms between the sexes, and was likely cause a deep personal dilemma if you thought on it for too long. There was also the predictable coda in which men of a certain stripe took to the internet to tell females how stupid they had been to select the animal and went on to limn the consequences they deserved for it. This at minimum allowed those females who were uncertain about their decision to make it with renewed assurance.

Dramatising the Setup

To Cook a Bear effectively dramatises this nifty little setup. The six-part series is based from Swedish author Mikael Niemi’s 2018 novel of the same name (rendered two years later for English readers). It traces the struggles of a clergyman (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his family as they come to start a fresh religious post in Kengis, an isolated village in Sweden’s north, 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 defense of the poor – especially the native Sami population, from among whom comes the pastor’s foster child Jussi (the young actor) – and his belief in societal fairness and equal rights that sets him in direct opposition against the Kengis powers that be.

The Opposing Forces

Soon in cahoots opposing him are the sheriff the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the fearsome mill owner the matron Sjödahl (the actress), observed initially dismissing a newly injured laborer with minimal compensation as he remains gibbering upon seeing of his pulped hand, and all others who benefit from a populace easily swayed with some containers of liquor sold by the unsettling store owner Lindmark (the actor). However, in fairness, Lindmark’s creepiness diminishes once itinerant painter the artist Beronius appears on the scene (the performer, providing a performance of exceptional unsettling intensity). If they are – similar to the clergyman – just slightly beyond being stereotypes, they are at least effective ones.

Plot Progression

Once the foundations of tension planted, it is time to proceed to narrative business. The maid employed by the doctor, the character Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), duly goes missing in the forest. Signs of her escape and animal scratches on a tree are found but she is completely absent. Gossip and fears of a man/maid-eating bear prowling the woodland spread, yet the clergyman holds a different view which he and his ward embark to prove.

A Strange Creation

This Bear Drama is a slightly odd beast. It creates a strong impression of the desolation that lets suspicion and prejudice and grim legends thrive from the native legend that bears can be controlled or inhabited by the souls of men. And it doesn’t romanticise the tough existence experienced by the residents, in which violence, be it from the wild or people, always looms at the periphery, waiting to erupt. Yet the personas rarely become more than ciphers – or maybe, while the conflicts between justice and revenge, logic and religion, good and wickedness intensify, representative characters in a fable – which stops the whole thing fully coming to life.

Tonal Inconsistencies

And then, there are the many stylistically clashing instances in which the pastor’s ability in finding evidence and determine Hilda’s fate becomes almost risible. He positions himself looking at broken milk pots and strands of fur in hay barns like a combined Hercule Poirot the English sleuth – alongside Jussi a particularly unfortunate Hastings-cum-Watson (none of whom had to lick a blend of blood spatter and saliva from his superior to agree that indeed, it was clearly coagulated blood at the crime scene), before announcing his newest conclusion and pulling a corpse out of a swamp.

Clashing Agendas

The local leaders are determined proving that the maid met her end by an animal, maybe to preserve the peace, perhaps to protect one of their own. The pastor is bent on establishing otherwise, and the proof so quickly stacks up in his favour that once more the drama’s plausibility and the viewer’s patience get strained. In its finest moments, To Cook a Bear evokes memories of the adaptation some years back of the author’s The Essex Serpent, through its portrayal of the competing allures and fears presented by science and religion. In its low points, it’s more like a bear-themed police procedural. Still, it does seem to offer the response to that debated question: “Ladies, take the bear.”

• To Cook a Bear streams on Disney+ now.