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An intense debate lately went viral on social media, after someone posed a query for females: would you rather find yourself stranded in a forest with a man or a bear? Like all the most engaging hypothetical scenarios, it exposed vastly opposing perspectives and life encounters, highlighted chasms between the sexes, and was likely to induce a deep personal dilemma if you thought on it for too long. There was also the predictable follow-up in which some males took to the internet to tell females how foolish they had been to select the bear and went on to describe the consequences they merited for that choice. This at least enabled those females who had been hesitating over their choice to make it with a new confidence.

Dramatising the Setup

To Cook a Bear skillfully brings to life this clever small premise. This six-episode drama is adapted from Scandinavian writer the novelist’s 2018 book of the same name (rendered in 2020 for English readers). It traces the struggles of a clergyman (the lead actor) and his household as they come to begin a fresh religious post within Kengis, a remote settlement in Sweden’s north, during the mid-19th century. Within a community with few pleasures, none of the inhabitants especially appreciate his strict stance on alcohol and revelry, yet it is his protection of impoverished people – especially the native Sami population, from which hails the preacher’s foster child Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in social justice and equality that places him in direct opposition with the Kengis powers that be.

The Antagonists

Soon in cahoots against him are the sheriff the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the intimidating factory proprietor Madam Sjödahl (Pernilla August), seen early on dismissing a recently mangled worker with minimal compensation as he remains babbling upon seeing his crushed hand, and anyone else who profit from a community easily swayed with some containers of liquor provided by the creepy store owner the merchant Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). Although, to be fair, Lindmark’s creepiness diminishes when itinerant painter the artist Beronius arrives in the story (the performer, providing a performance of exceptional unsettling intensity). If they are – like the pastor himself – only a little more being stereotypes, they still serve as effective ones.

Plot Progression

Once the foundations of conflict planted, it is time to proceed with the storyline. The servant from the doctor’s house, Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), accordingly vanishes from the woods. Indications of her flight and bear markings upon a trunk are found but she is nowhere to be seen. Rumours and fears regarding a human-devouring bear roaming the woods spread, yet the clergyman has another theory that he and Jussi embark to verify.

An Odd Beast

To Cook a Bear is a slightly peculiar show. It conjures a fine sense of the bleakness that lets suspicion and bias and dark myths thrive from the native legend that animals can be controlled or possessed by the souls of humans. It avoids romanticise the tough existence led by the residents, where brutality, whether that of the wild or mankind, lurks constantly at the periphery, poised to explode. But the characters rarely become beyond symbols – or maybe, while the conflicts amid fairness and revenge, logic and faith, good and evil escalate, emblematic figures within a moral tale – preventing the entire production fully becoming immersive.

Tonal Inconsistencies

Additionally, there are the many stylistically clashing moments in which the pastor’s ability in finding evidence and discern Hilda’s fate turns nearly laughable. 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 particularly unfortunate assistant figure (none of whom had to taste a mixture of blood droplets and saliva from his superior to agree that indeed, it was clearly coagulated blood at the crime scene), prior to declaring his latest deduction and pulling a corpse from a bog.

Clashing Agendas

The local leaders are bent on proving that the maid met her end by an animal, perhaps to protect the calm, perhaps to shield one of their own. The pastor is bent on establishing otherwise, and the evidence so rapidly stacks up in his favour that once more the show’s credibility and audience tolerance are tested. In its finest moments, the series is reminiscent of the adaptation some years back of Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, through its portrayal of the competing attractions and fears presented by science and religion. At its worst, 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.”

• The series streams on Disney+ now.