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A heated debate lately spread widely on social media, following someone asked a query for females: which would you prefer find yourself stranded in the woods alongside a male or with a bear? Like all the best thought experiments, it exposed vastly opposing worldviews and life encounters, illuminated divides between the sexes, and could easily to induce a deep personal dilemma if you thought about it extensively. There was also the predictable coda where men of a certain stripe took to the internet to tell women how foolish they were to select the bear and proceeded to limn the punishments they deserved for that choice. This at minimum allowed the women who had been hesitating about their decision to make it with a new confidence.

Portraying the Setup

To Cook a Bear effectively brings to life this nifty little setup. This six-episode drama is adapted on Scandinavian writer the novelist’s 2018 novel of the same name (rendered in 2020 for an English audience). It traces the tribulations of a pastor (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his family when they arrive to start a new ministry in Kengis, an isolated village in northern Sweden, in 1852. Within a community with few pleasures, none of the locals especially appreciate his puritanical approach to drinking and dancing, but it is his protection of the poor – especially the indigenous Sami, from which hails the preacher’s foster child Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in social justice and equal rights that places him in direct opposition against the Kengis powers that be.

The Antagonists

Soon in cahoots against him include the lawman the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the intimidating factory proprietor the matron Sjödahl (the actress), seen early on dismissing a newly injured worker with a month’s pay while he is still gibbering at the sight his crushed 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 Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). However, in fairness, Lindmark’s creepiness pales when travelling artist Beronius appears on the scene (the performer, delivering an acting turn of rare discomfiting power). If they are – similar to the clergyman – just slightly beyond being stereotypes, they still serve as effective ones.

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), duly vanishes from the woods. Indications of her flight and animal scratches on a tree are found yet she remains completely absent. Rumours and anxieties of a man/maid-eating beast roaming the woodland spread, but the pastor has another theory that he and Jussi embark to verify.

A Strange Creation

To Cook a Bear is a somewhat odd beast. It creates a strong impression of the desolation that lets suspicion and bias and grim legends thrive based on local folklore that animals can be controlled or inhabited by the spirits of men. And it doesn’t idealising the tough existence led by the residents, in which brutality, be it from the wild or people, lurks constantly on the edges, waiting to erupt. Yet the personas rarely become more than ciphers – or perhaps, as the struggles between justice and vengeance, rationality and faith, virtue and evil escalate, representative characters within a moral tale – preventing the entire production truly coming to life.

Stylistic Shifts

And then, exist the many stylistically clashing instances in which the clergyman’s skill to discover clues and determine Hilda’s fate becomes nearly laughable. He stands observing shattered containers and clumps of hair in hay barns as a fusion of Hercule Poirot and Sherlock Holmes – alongside Jussi a particularly unfortunate assistant figure (neither of whom were required to lick a mixture of blood droplets and saliva from his superior to agree that indeed, it was clearly dried blood on the site), prior to declaring his newest conclusion and extracting a body from a bog.

Opposing Goals

The local leaders are bent on demonstrating that the maid was killed by an animal, perhaps to protect the calm, perhaps to shield one of their own. The pastor is bent on establishing otherwise, and the proof so quickly accumulates in his favour that again the show’s credibility and audience tolerance get strained. In its finest moments, To Cook a Bear evokes memories of the adaptation some years back of Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the opposing attractions and fears offered by rational thought and religion. At its worst, it’s more like Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Still, it appears to provide the response to the earlier query: “Females, choose the animal.”

• To Cook a Bear streams on Disney+ now.