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An heated discussion recently spread widely across online platforms, following a user posed the question to women: which would you prefer find yourself stranded in a forest with a man or with a bear? Like all the most engaging thought experiments, it exposed vastly opposing perspectives and life encounters, highlighted divides between the sexes, and could easily to induce an existential crisis if you thought on it for too long. There was also the almost inevitable coda in which some males took to the internet to tell females how stupid they were for choosing the bear and proceeded to describe the punishments they merited for it. This at least enabled those females who had been hesitating about their decision to decide with renewed assurance.

Dramatising the Setup

To Cook a Bear skillfully brings to life this clever small premise. This six-episode series is adapted from Swedish author the novelist’s 2018 book with the identical title (translated two years later 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, an isolated settlement in Sweden’s north, in 1852. In a place with few pleasures, none of the locals especially appreciate his strict stance on drinking and revelry, but it is his defense of the poor – especially the native Sami population, from among whom hails the pastor’s foster child the youth Jussi (the young actor) – and his conviction in societal fairness and equal rights that sets him in direct opposition with the Kengis local authorities.

The Opposing Forces

Quickly in cahoots against him are the lawman Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the fearsome factory proprietor Madam Sjödahl (the actress), seen initially firing a recently mangled laborer with minimal compensation while he is still babbling upon seeing his crushed hand, and anyone else who benefit from a community who can be bought for a few bottles of liquor provided by the unsettling store owner the merchant Lindmark (the actor). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s creepiness pales when travelling artist the artist Beronius appears on the scene (Simon J Berger, providing 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 with the storyline. The servant from the doctor’s house, Hilda (the actress), duly vanishes from the woods. Signs of her escape and animal scratches upon a trunk get discovered yet she remains completely absent. Gossip and anxieties regarding a human-devouring beast prowling the woods spread, yet the clergyman has another theory that he and Jussi set out to prove.

A Strange Creation

To Cook a Bear is a somewhat odd beast. It creates a strong impression of the desolation that lets distrust and bias and dark myths flourish based on local folklore that animals can be controlled or possessed by the souls of humans. And it doesn’t romanticise the hardscrabble life experienced by the villagers, where brutality, be it from nature or mankind, always looms at the periphery, poised to explode. Yet the personas rarely become more than ciphers – or perhaps, as the struggles amid fairness and vengeance, rationality and religion, virtue and evil intensify, representative characters within a moral tale – preventing the entire production truly coming to life.

Tonal Inconsistencies

Additionally, there are numerous stylistically clashing moments in which the pastor’s ability to discover clues and determine the maid’s destiny becomes almost risible. He stands observing shattered containers and strands of fur in hay barns like a combined Hercule Poirot and Sherlock Holmes – with Jussi a particularly unfortunate assistant figure (none of whom were required to taste a blend of blood spatter and saliva from his superior to confirm that, yes, it was clearly dried blood on the site), before announcing his newest conclusion and extracting a body out of a swamp.

Opposing Goals

The local leaders are bent on proving that the maid met her end by an animal, maybe to preserve the peace, perhaps to shield one of their own. The clergyman is intent on establishing the opposite, and the proof so rapidly accumulates in his favour that again the show’s credibility and the viewer’s patience are tested. In its finest moments, the series is reminiscent of the adaptation a few years ago of the author’s The Essex Serpent, through its portrayal of the competing allures and fears presented by rational thought and religion. At its worst, it’s more like a bear-themed police procedural. Still, it appears to provide the answer to that debated question: “Ladies, take the bear.”

• To Cook a Bear streams on Disney+ now.