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A intense debate lately went viral across online platforms, after someone posed the question for females: which would you prefer be lost in the woods alongside a male or with a bear? Like all the best thought experiments, it revealed vastly opposing worldviews and life encounters, highlighted divides among genders, and was likely to induce an existential crisis for anyone pondering about it extensively. There was also the almost inevitable follow-up in which some males took to the internet to tell females how stupid they were to select the bear and proceeded to limn the consequences they deserved for it. This at minimum allowed the women who had been hesitating about their decision to decide with renewed assurance.

Dramatising the Scenario

To Cook a Bear effectively brings to life this clever little setup. This six-episode series is based from Swedish author the novelist’s 2018 novel of the same name (translated two years later for an English audience). It follows the struggles of a pastor (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his family when they arrive to begin a new ministry within Kengis, a remote village in Sweden’s north, in 1852. In a place with few pleasures, none of the inhabitants particularly warm to his strict stance on alcohol and revelry, but it is his defense of impoverished people – especially the native Sami population, from which comes the preacher’s adopted son Jussi (the young actor) – and his conviction in societal fairness and equality that places him on a collision course against the Kengis powers that be.

The Opposing Forces

Soon collaborating opposing him are the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the intimidating mill owner the matron Sjödahl (Pernilla August), seen initially dismissing a recently mangled worker with minimal compensation while he is still babbling at the sight of his pulped hand, and anyone else who benefit from a community easily swayed for a few bottles of liquor sold by the creepy store owner the merchant Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). However, in fairness, Lindmark’s creepiness diminishes when travelling artist Beronius appears on the scene (the performer, delivering an acting turn of rare unsettling intensity). While they remain – similar to the clergyman – only a little more being stereotypes, they still serve as effective ones.

Narrative Development

With the seeds of conflict planted, it is time to proceed with the storyline. The maid employed by the doctor, the character Hilda (the actress), duly vanishes in the forest. Signs of her escape and bear markings upon a trunk get discovered yet she remains nowhere to be seen. Gossip and anxieties regarding a human-devouring beast roaming the woods spread, yet the clergyman holds a different view which he and his ward set out to prove.

An Odd Beast

To Cook a Bear is a somewhat odd beast. It creates a fine sense of the desolation that lets suspicion and prejudice and dark myths thrive from the native legend that animals might be dominated or inhabited by the souls of men. It avoids romanticise the tough existence experienced by the residents, where violence, whether that of nature or people, always looms at the periphery, waiting to erupt. Yet the personas seldom evolve more than ciphers – or maybe, while the conflicts between justice and revenge, logic and religion, virtue and wickedness intensify, representative characters in a fable – preventing the entire production fully coming to life.

Stylistic Shifts

Additionally, there are numerous stylistically clashing instances in which the clergyman’s skill in finding evidence and discern the maid’s destiny turns nearly laughable. He stands looking at broken milk pots and clumps of hair in hay barns as a fusion of Hercule Poirot and Sherlock Holmes – with Jussi a rather hapless Hastings-cum-Watson (neither of whom were required to lick a mixture of blood spatter and saliva from his superior to confirm that, yes, it was definitely dried blood on the site), before announcing his latest deduction and pulling a corpse out of a swamp.

Clashing Agendas

The village elite are bent on demonstrating that Hilda was killed by a bear, maybe to protect the peace, or possibly to shield a fellow elite. The clergyman is intent on proving the opposite, and the proof so quickly accumulates in his favour that again the drama’s plausibility and audience tolerance get strained. At its best, the series evokes memories of the adaptation some years back of the author’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the opposing attractions and terrors offered by science and belief. At its worst, it’s more like Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Nevertheless, it does seem to offer the response to the earlier query: “Females, choose the animal.”

• The series streams on Disney+ currently.