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A heated discussion recently spread widely across online platforms, following a user asked a query to women: would you rather find yourself stranded in a forest with a man or with a bear? Like all the best thought experiments, it exposed vastly opposing perspectives and experiences, illuminated chasms between the sexes, and was likely cause a deep personal dilemma for anyone pondering about it extensively. Additionally, there came the almost inevitable coda where men of a certain stripe took to the internet to inform females how stupid they had been to select the animal and went on to limn the consequences they merited for it. This at minimum allowed the women who were uncertain over their choice to decide with a new confidence.

Portraying the Scenario

The Bear-Cooking Tale effectively dramatises this clever small premise. This six-episode drama is adapted from Scandinavian writer Mikael Niemi’s 2018 book with the identical title (translated in 2020 for an English audience). It traces the tribulations of a clergyman (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his household as they come to begin a new ministry within Kengis, a remote village in northern Sweden, during the mid-19th century. Within a community with few pleasures, none of the locals especially warm to his strict stance on drinking and revelry, but it is his protection of impoverished people – particularly the indigenous Sami, from among whom comes the pastor’s foster child Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his conviction in societal fairness and equality that places him in direct opposition with the Kengis powers that be.

The Opposing Forces

Quickly collaborating opposing him are the sheriff the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the fearsome factory proprietor Madam Sjödahl (Pernilla August), observed early on firing a recently mangled laborer with minimal compensation while he is still babbling upon seeing of his pulped hand, and all others who benefit from a populace easily swayed with some containers of liquor provided by the unsettling store owner the merchant Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s creepiness diminishes once travelling artist Beronius appears on the scene (the performer, providing an acting turn of exceptional discomfiting power). If they are – like the pastor himself – only a little more being stereotypes, they are at least potent archetypes.

Narrative Development

Once the foundations of conflict planted, it is time to proceed with the storyline. The servant employed by the doctor, the character Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), duly vanishes in the forest. Signs of her escape and bear markings upon a trunk get discovered yet she remains nowhere to be seen. Rumours and anxieties of a man/maid-eating bear prowling the woodland spread, but the pastor holds a different view which he and his ward embark to verify.

A Strange Creation

This Bear Drama is a somewhat odd beast. It conjures a strong impression of the bleakness that allows distrust and bias and grim legends flourish based on local folklore that bears can be controlled or possessed by the souls of humans. It avoids idealising the hardscrabble life experienced by the residents, in which violence, whether that of the wild or mankind, always looms on the edges, waiting to erupt. Yet the personas seldom evolve more than ciphers – or maybe, as the struggles between justice and revenge, logic and religion, virtue and wickedness escalate, representative characters within a moral tale – preventing the whole thing fully coming to life.

Stylistic Shifts

Additionally, exist numerous stylistically clashing instances where the pastor’s ability to discover clues and determine the maid’s destiny turns almost risible. He stands observing broken milk pots and strands of fur in hay barns as a fusion of Hercule Poirot the English sleuth – alongside Jussi a particularly unfortunate Hastings-cum-Watson (neither of whom had to lick a mixture of blood spatter and the boss’s spit to agree that, yes, it was definitely dried blood on the site), before announcing his newest conclusion and extracting a corpse from a bog.

Opposing Goals

The village elite are determined demonstrating that the maid met her end by an animal, maybe to protect the calm, or possibly to shield one of their own. The clergyman is bent on establishing the opposite, and the proof so quickly stacks up in his favour that again the show’s credibility and the viewer’s patience are tested. At its best, the series is reminiscent of the adaptation a few years ago of the author’s the serpent tale, with its evocation of the opposing allures and fears presented by science and religion. At its worst, it resembles a bear-themed police procedural. Still, it appears to provide the response to that debated question: “Females, choose the animal.”

• To Cook a Bear is on Disney+ now.