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A heated discussion recently went viral across online platforms, after someone asked the question for females: 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 revealed wildly different worldviews and experiences, highlighted divides among genders, and could easily to induce a deep personal dilemma if you thought about it for too long. Additionally, there came the almost inevitable coda where men of a certain stripe came online to tell women how foolish they were for choosing the bear and proceeded to limn the consequences they deserved for it. This at least enabled the women who were uncertain about their decision to make it with renewed assurance.

Dramatising the Scenario

To Cook a Bear skillfully brings to life this clever small premise. This six-episode drama is based on Scandinavian writer the novelist’s 2018 novel with the identical title (translated two years later for English readers). It traces the tribulations of a pastor (the lead actor) and his household as they come to begin a fresh religious post within Kengis, an isolated village in Sweden’s north, during the mid-19th century. In a place with few pleasures, none of the inhabitants especially warm to his puritanical stance on alcohol and revelry, but it is his protection of the poor – especially the native Sami population, from which comes the pastor’s adopted son Jussi (the young actor) – and his belief in societal fairness and equality that places him on a collision course with the Kengis powers that be.

The Opposing Forces

Soon in cahoots opposing him include the lawman Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the fearsome mill owner the matron Sjödahl (Pernilla August), observed early on dismissing a recently mangled laborer with a month’s pay as he remains gibbering at the sight of his pulped hand, and all others who profit from a community who can be bought with some containers of the whisky provided by the unsettling store owner the merchant Lindmark (the actor). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s creepiness diminishes when travelling artist the artist Beronius arrives on the scene (the performer, providing an acting turn of rare discomfiting power). While they remain – like the pastor himself – only a little more than caricatures, they still serve as potent archetypes.

Plot Progression

Once the foundations of conflict planted, the moment arrives to get down to narrative business. The maid employed by the doctor, Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), accordingly vanishes in the forest. Signs of her escape and animal scratches on a tree are found yet she remains completely absent. Rumours and anxieties regarding a human-devouring bear prowling the woodland circulate, yet the clergyman holds a different view that he and Jussi set out to prove.

A Strange Creation

To Cook a Bear is a slightly peculiar show. It creates a fine sense of the bleakness that lets suspicion and bias and grim legends thrive based on local folklore that animals might be dominated or inhabited by the souls of men. It avoids romanticise the hardscrabble life experienced by the residents, in which brutality, be it from nature or mankind, lurks constantly on the edges, poised to explode. But the characters rarely become beyond symbols – or perhaps, while the conflicts between justice and revenge, logic and faith, good and evil intensify, emblematic figures within a moral tale – preventing the whole thing fully coming to life.

Tonal Inconsistencies

Additionally, there are the many tonally jarring instances where the clergyman’s skill in finding evidence and discern the maid’s destiny becomes nearly laughable. He stands looking at shattered containers and clumps of hair in hay barns like a combined Hercule Poirot and Sherlock Holmes – alongside Jussi a rather hapless Hastings-cum-Watson (neither of whom were required to taste a blend of blood spatter and the boss’s spit to confirm that indeed, it was definitely dried blood at the crime scene), before announcing his latest deduction and pulling a body from a bog.

Opposing Goals

The local leaders are determined demonstrating that the maid met her end by a bear, maybe to preserve the calm, or possibly to shield one of their own. The clergyman is intent on proving the opposite, and the proof so rapidly accumulates supporting his view that once more the drama’s plausibility and audience tolerance get strained. In its finest moments, the series is reminiscent of the TV version some years back of Sarah Perry’s the serpent tale, with its evocation of the competing allures and terrors 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 that debated question: “Ladies, take the bear.”

• To Cook a Bear is on Disney+ currently.