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An heated discussion recently went viral on social media, following someone asked a query to women: which would you prefer be lost in a forest with a man or a bear? Similar to the most engaging hypothetical scenarios, it exposed vastly opposing worldviews and experiences, highlighted divides between the sexes, and was likely to induce a deep personal dilemma for anyone pondering on it extensively. Additionally, there came the predictable follow-up where some males came online to inform females how foolish they were to select the bear and proceeded to describe the consequences they deserved for that choice. This at minimum enabled the women who had been hesitating about their decision to make it with a new confidence.

Dramatising the Scenario

To Cook a Bear skillfully dramatises this clever little setup. The six-part drama is based from Scandinavian writer Mikael Niemi’s 2018 book with the identical title (translated two years later for an English audience). It traces the tribulations of a clergyman (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his household as they come to begin a fresh religious post in Kengis, a remote settlement in northern Sweden, in 1852. Within a community lacking many joys, not one of the locals especially appreciate his puritanical approach to drinking and dancing, but it is his defense of the poor – especially the indigenous Sami, from which comes the preacher’s foster child Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in social justice and equal rights that sets him on a collision course against the Kengis powers that be.

The Antagonists

Soon in cahoots opposing him include the lawman Brahe (the performer), the fearsome mill owner Madam Sjödahl (the actress), seen initially firing a recently mangled worker with a month’s pay as he remains babbling at the sight his crushed hand, and all others who profit from a populace who can be bought for a few bottles of the whisky provided by the creepy shopkeeper Lindmark (the actor). Although, to be fair, Lindmark’s creepiness diminishes once travelling artist Beronius appears on the scene (the performer, delivering a performance of rare unsettling intensity). While they remain – similar to the clergyman – just slightly beyond being stereotypes, they still serve as potent archetypes.

Narrative Development

Once the foundations of conflict planted, the moment arrives to get down to narrative business. The servant from the doctor’s house, the character Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), accordingly goes missing from the woods. Indications of her escape and animal scratches upon a trunk get discovered but she is completely absent. Gossip and anxieties of a man/maid-eating bear roaming the woods circulate, but the pastor 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 allows distrust and prejudice and dark myths flourish based on local folklore that bears can be controlled or inhabited by the souls of humans. And it doesn’t idealising the hardscrabble life led by the villagers, in which violence, whether that of nature or mankind, lurks constantly at the periphery, poised to explode. But the characters rarely become beyond symbols – or perhaps, as the struggles between justice and revenge, rationality and religion, good and evil intensify, emblematic figures within a moral tale – preventing the entire production fully coming to life.

Tonal Inconsistencies

And then, exist the many stylistically clashing instances where the clergyman’s skill to discover clues and discern Hilda’s fate turns nearly laughable. He stands looking at broken milk pots and clumps of hair in hay barns as a fusion of Hercule Poirot the English sleuth – with Jussi a rather hapless assistant figure (none of whom had to taste a blend of blood spatter and the boss’s spit to confirm that, yes, it was clearly dried blood at the crime scene), before announcing his newest conclusion and pulling a body out of a swamp.

Clashing Agendas

The village elite are bent on proving that Hilda met her end by a bear, maybe to preserve the calm, perhaps to protect one of their own. The clergyman is intent on proving otherwise, and the evidence so rapidly stacks up supporting his view that once more the show’s credibility and audience tolerance are tested. At its best, the series evokes memories of the adaptation a few years ago of Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the competing attractions and fears offered by rational thought and religion. At its worst, it’s more like Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Nevertheless, it appears to offer the answer to the earlier query: “Females, choose the animal.”

• To Cook a Bear is on Disney+ now.