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An heated discussion recently went viral across online platforms, following a user posed a query for females: would you rather find yourself stranded in a forest alongside a male or a bear? Similar to the most engaging thought experiments, it revealed wildly different worldviews and life encounters, highlighted divides between the sexes, and could easily to induce a deep personal dilemma if you thought on it extensively. Additionally, there came the predictable coda where men of a certain stripe came online to inform women how stupid they had been for choosing the animal and proceeded to describe the consequences they merited for it. This at minimum allowed those females who had been hesitating about their decision to decide with renewed assurance.

Dramatising the Scenario

The Bear-Cooking Tale skillfully brings to life this nifty little setup. The six-part series is based from Swedish author the novelist’s 2018 novel of the same name (translated two years later for English readers). It follows the tribulations of a pastor (the lead actor) and his family when they arrive to begin a fresh religious post in Kengis, an isolated village in Sweden’s north, in 1852. In a place lacking many joys, none of the locals especially warm to his puritanical stance on drinking and dancing, yet it is his protection of impoverished people – particularly the native Sami population, from among whom comes the preacher’s foster child Jussi (the young actor) – and his conviction in societal fairness and equality that sets him on a collision course with the Kengis local authorities.

The Opposing Forces

Quickly in cahoots opposing him include the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the intimidating factory proprietor Madam Sjödahl (the actress), observed early on dismissing a recently mangled laborer with a month’s pay as he remains babbling upon seeing of his pulped hand, and anyone else who profit from a community easily swayed for a few bottles of liquor provided by the creepy store owner Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). However, in fairness, Lindmark’s eeriness diminishes when itinerant painter the artist Beronius arrives in the story (Simon J Berger, delivering an acting turn of exceptional discomfiting power). If they are – similar to the clergyman – just slightly beyond than caricatures, they still serve as potent archetypes.

Plot Progression

Once the foundations of tension sown, the moment arrives to proceed to narrative business. The servant from the doctor’s house, the character Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), duly goes missing in the forest. Indications of her flight and animal scratches on a tree get discovered but she is completely absent. Rumours and fears regarding a human-devouring beast roaming the woodland spread, but the pastor has another theory which he and his ward embark to prove.

A Strange Creation

To Cook a Bear is a slightly peculiar show. It conjures a strong impression of the desolation that allows suspicion and bias and dark myths flourish from the native legend that bears can be controlled or inhabited by the souls of humans. It avoids idealising the hardscrabble life led by the residents, in which violence, be it from the wild or mankind, lurks constantly at the periphery, poised to explode. But the characters rarely become more than ciphers – or maybe, while the conflicts between justice and revenge, rationality and faith, virtue and wickedness escalate, emblematic figures within a moral tale – which stops the whole thing truly becoming immersive.

Tonal Inconsistencies

Additionally, exist the many stylistically clashing moments where the pastor’s ability to discover clues and determine Hilda’s fate becomes almost risible. He positions himself observing broken milk pots and clumps of hair in hay barns like a combined Hercule Poirot the English sleuth – alongside Jussi a rather hapless assistant figure (none of whom had to taste a blend of blood droplets and the boss’s spit to agree that, yes, it was definitely coagulated blood on the site), before announcing his newest conclusion and pulling a body from a bog.

Opposing Goals

The village elite are determined demonstrating that the maid met her end by a bear, maybe to preserve the calm, or possibly to shield one of their own. The pastor is intent on establishing otherwise, and the evidence so quickly stacks up in his favour that once more the drama’s plausibility and the viewer’s patience are tested. In its finest moments, the series is reminiscent of the adaptation some years back of the author’s the serpent tale, through its portrayal of the competing allures and terrors offered by rational thought and belief. In its low points, it’s more like a bear-themed police procedural. Still, it does seem to provide the response to the earlier query: “Ladies, take the bear.”

• The series streams on Disney+ currently.