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A intense debate lately spread widely across online platforms, following someone posed the question to women: would you rather be lost in the woods with a man or a bear? Similar to the most engaging hypothetical scenarios, it exposed vastly opposing worldviews and experiences, illuminated chasms between the sexes, and was likely to induce a deep personal dilemma if you thought about it for too long. Additionally, there came the almost inevitable coda in which men of a certain stripe came online to tell females how stupid they had been to select the bear and went on to limn the consequences they merited for it. This at minimum allowed the women who were uncertain about their decision to decide with a new confidence.

Portraying the Scenario

To Cook a Bear effectively brings to life this clever little setup. This six-episode drama is adapted on Swedish author the novelist’s 2018 book with the identical title (translated in 2020 for an English audience). It follows the struggles of a clergyman (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his family as they come to start a new ministry in Kengis, a remote village in Sweden’s north, in 1852. In a place with few pleasures, not one of the locals particularly appreciate his puritanical stance on alcohol and revelry, but it is his protection of impoverished people – particularly the indigenous Sami, from among whom comes the pastor’s adopted son Jussi (the young actor) – and his belief in societal fairness and equality that sets him on a collision course against the Kengis local authorities.

The Antagonists

Soon in cahoots against him are the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the intimidating factory proprietor Madam Sjödahl (Pernilla August), seen early on firing a recently mangled laborer with minimal compensation as he remains babbling at the sight his crushed hand, and anyone else who profit from a community who can be bought for a few bottles of liquor provided by the creepy store owner Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). Although, in fairness, Lindmark’s eeriness pales when itinerant painter the artist Beronius arrives on the scene (Simon J Berger, providing an acting turn of rare unsettling intensity). While they remain – like the pastor himself – only a little more being stereotypes, they are at least effective ones.

Plot Progression

With the seeds of conflict sown, the moment arrives to proceed to narrative business. The servant employed by the doctor, the character Hilda (the actress), accordingly goes missing in the forest. Indications of her flight and animal scratches upon a trunk are found yet she remains nowhere to be seen. Rumours and fears regarding a human-devouring bear roaming the woodland spread, but the pastor has another theory which he and his ward set out to prove.

A Strange Creation

To Cook a Bear is a somewhat peculiar show. It creates a strong impression of the desolation that allows suspicion and bias and grim legends flourish from the native legend that bears can be controlled or inhabited by the souls of humans. And it doesn’t romanticise the hardscrabble life led by the residents, where violence, whether that of nature or people, always looms on the edges, poised to explode. Yet the personas rarely become beyond symbols – or maybe, as the struggles between justice and vengeance, rationality and faith, good and wickedness escalate, emblematic figures within a moral tale – preventing the whole thing truly coming to life.

Stylistic Shifts

And then, exist the many stylistically clashing moments where the clergyman’s skill in finding evidence and determine the maid’s destiny turns almost risible. He positions himself observing broken milk pots and clumps of hair in hay barns like a combined the Belgian detective and Sherlock Holmes – alongside Jussi a rather hapless Hastings-cum-Watson (neither of whom were required to lick a blend of blood droplets and saliva from his superior to agree that, yes, it was definitely dried blood on the site), before announcing his newest conclusion and pulling a body from a bog.

Opposing Goals

The village elite are determined proving that the maid was killed by a bear, perhaps to preserve the peace, or possibly to protect a fellow elite. The clergyman is intent on establishing the opposite, and the evidence so quickly stacks up in his favour that once more the show’s credibility and audience tolerance are tested. At its best, To Cook a Bear is reminiscent of the TV version some years back of the author’s the serpent tale, with its evocation 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 provide the response to that debated question: “Ladies, take the bear.”

• To Cook a Bear streams on Disney+ currently.