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An intense discussion recently went viral across online platforms, after a user asked a query for females: which would you prefer find yourself stranded in the woods with a man or a bear? Like all the best hypothetical scenarios, it revealed vastly opposing worldviews and life encounters, highlighted chasms among genders, and was likely to induce an existential crisis for anyone pondering about it extensively. There was also the almost inevitable coda in which men of a certain stripe came online to inform women how foolish they were to select the animal and proceeded to describe the consequences they deserved for it. This at minimum enabled those females who were uncertain about their decision to make it with renewed assurance.

Dramatising the Setup

To Cook a Bear effectively brings to life this nifty small premise. 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 follows the struggles of a clergyman (the lead actor) and his household when they arrive to start a new ministry in Kengis, an isolated settlement in Sweden’s north, during the mid-19th century. Within a community with few pleasures, not one of the inhabitants particularly warm to his puritanical approach to drinking and revelry, yet it is his defense of the poor – especially the indigenous Sami, from among whom comes the pastor’s foster child the youth Jussi (the young actor) – and his belief in societal fairness and equal rights that places him on a collision course with the Kengis powers that be.

The Opposing Forces

Quickly collaborating against him are the sheriff the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the intimidating factory proprietor Madam Sjödahl (Pernilla August), seen initially firing a newly injured worker with minimal compensation as he remains babbling upon seeing his crushed hand, and anyone else who benefit from a populace who can be bought with some containers of the whisky sold by the creepy store owner Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). However, in fairness, Lindmark’s creepiness diminishes when itinerant painter Beronius appears on the scene (Simon J Berger, providing an acting turn of rare discomfiting power). If they are – like the pastor himself – just slightly beyond being stereotypes, they still serve as potent archetypes.

Plot Progression

With the seeds of tension sown, it is time to proceed to narrative business. The maid from the doctor’s house, the character Hilda (the actress), duly vanishes from the woods. Signs of her flight and bear markings upon a trunk are found yet she remains completely absent. Rumours and anxieties of a man/maid-eating bear roaming the woods circulate, yet the clergyman has another theory which he and his ward set out to prove.

A Strange Creation

This Bear Drama is a somewhat peculiar show. It conjures a fine sense of the desolation that lets suspicion and prejudice and grim legends thrive from the native legend that animals can be controlled or inhabited by the spirits of humans. And it doesn’t romanticise the tough existence experienced by the villagers, where violence, whether that of the wild or people, lurks constantly at the periphery, poised to explode. But the characters seldom evolve more than ciphers – or perhaps, while the conflicts between justice and vengeance, rationality and faith, virtue and evil intensify, emblematic figures in a fable – which stops the entire production truly coming to life.

Stylistic Shifts

And then, there are the many tonally jarring moments where the clergyman’s skill in finding evidence and determine the maid’s destiny turns almost risible. He stands observing broken milk pots and strands of fur in hay barns like a combined the Belgian detective and Sherlock Holmes – alongside Jussi a rather hapless Hastings-cum-Watson (none of whom were required to taste a mixture of blood droplets and saliva from his superior to agree that indeed, it was definitely dried blood at the crime scene), prior to declaring his newest conclusion and extracting a body from a bog.

Opposing Goals

The village elite are bent on proving that the maid was killed by a bear, maybe to preserve the peace, or possibly to shield one of their own. The pastor is intent on proving otherwise, and the evidence so quickly accumulates in his favour that once more the show’s credibility and the viewer’s patience get strained. At its best, the series is reminiscent of the TV version a few years ago of the author’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the opposing attractions and fears offered by science and religion. In its low points, it resembles a bear-themed police procedural. Still, it does seem to offer the response to the earlier query: “Ladies, take the bear.”

• To Cook a Bear streams on Disney+ now.