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A intense debate recently spread widely across online platforms, following a user posed a query for females: would you rather be lost in a forest with a man or a bear? Like all the most engaging hypothetical scenarios, it exposed wildly different worldviews and experiences, illuminated divides among genders, and could easily cause an existential crisis if you thought on it for too long. Additionally, there came the almost inevitable coda in which men of a certain stripe came online to tell women how stupid they had been for choosing the animal and proceeded to limn the punishments they deserved for it. This at minimum allowed the women who had been hesitating over their choice to decide with a new confidence.

Portraying the Setup

To Cook a Bear skillfully dramatises this clever small premise. The six-part series is adapted from Swedish author Mikael Niemi’s 2018 novel with the identical title (translated in 2020 for an English audience). It traces the tribulations of a clergyman (the lead actor) and his family when they arrive to begin a fresh religious post in Kengis, a remote village in northern Sweden, during the mid-19th century. Within a community lacking many joys, none of the locals especially appreciate his puritanical approach to drinking and dancing, yet it is his defense of the poor – especially the indigenous Sami, from which comes the pastor’s adopted son the youth Jussi (the young actor) – and his conviction in social justice and equal rights that sets him in direct opposition with the Kengis powers that be.

The Opposing Forces

Quickly collaborating opposing him include the sheriff the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the fearsome factory proprietor Madam Sjödahl (the actress), observed early on firing a newly injured worker with minimal compensation as he remains gibbering at the sight his crushed hand, and anyone else who benefit from a community who can be bought with some containers of the whisky sold by the creepy shopkeeper Lindmark (the actor). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s eeriness diminishes when travelling artist the artist Beronius arrives on the scene (Simon J Berger, providing a performance of rare discomfiting power). While they remain – like the pastor himself – only a little more being stereotypes, they still serve as potent archetypes.

Plot Progression

Once the foundations of tension planted, the moment arrives to proceed to narrative business. The maid from the doctor’s house, Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), duly goes missing from the woods. Signs of her flight and bear markings on a tree get discovered but she is nowhere to be seen. Rumours and anxieties regarding a human-devouring beast prowling the woodland circulate, but the pastor holds a different view that he and Jussi set out to verify.

A Strange Creation

To Cook a Bear is a somewhat odd beast. It conjures a fine sense of the bleakness that allows suspicion and prejudice and grim legends thrive based on local folklore that animals can be controlled or possessed by the souls of men. It avoids romanticise the tough existence experienced by the residents, where violence, be it from the wild or mankind, always looms at the periphery, waiting to erupt. But the characters rarely become more than ciphers – or maybe, while the conflicts amid fairness and revenge, rationality and religion, virtue and wickedness escalate, emblematic figures within a moral tale – which stops the entire production fully becoming immersive.

Tonal Inconsistencies

Additionally, exist the many tonally jarring moments in which the pastor’s ability in finding evidence and determine Hilda’s fate turns almost risible. He positions himself looking at broken milk pots and clumps of hair within storage sheds as a fusion of Hercule Poirot the English sleuth – with Jussi a rather hapless Hastings-cum-Watson (neither of whom had to taste a blend of blood spatter and the boss’s spit to confirm that, yes, it was clearly dried blood on the site), prior to declaring his newest conclusion and extracting a body from a bog.

Clashing Agendas

The village elite are determined demonstrating that Hilda met her end by an animal, perhaps to preserve the peace, perhaps to protect one of their own. The clergyman is bent on proving otherwise, and the evidence so rapidly accumulates supporting his view that again the show’s credibility and the viewer’s patience are tested. At its best, To Cook a Bear evokes memories of the adaptation a few years ago of Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, through its portrayal 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 offer the answer to the earlier query: “Ladies, take the bear.”

• To Cook a Bear streams on Disney+ currently.