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A heated discussion recently spread widely across online platforms, following a user asked a query for females: would you rather be lost in the woods with a man or with a bear? Like all the most engaging thought experiments, it exposed wildly different perspectives and experiences, illuminated divides among genders, and was likely cause a deep personal dilemma if you thought about it for too long. There was also the predictable follow-up in which some males came online to tell women how stupid they were to select the bear and went on to describe the punishments they merited for that choice. This at least enabled those females who had been hesitating about their decision to decide with a new confidence.

Dramatising the Setup

To Cook a Bear effectively brings to life this clever small premise. The six-part series is adapted on Swedish author the novelist’s 2018 book of the same name (translated two years later for English readers). It traces the tribulations of a pastor (the lead actor) and his family as they come to start a new ministry in Kengis, a remote village in northern Sweden, in 1852. In a place lacking many joys, none of the inhabitants particularly warm to his strict approach to alcohol and dancing, yet it is his defense of the poor – particularly the indigenous Sami, from which hails the preacher’s adopted son Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his conviction in social justice and equal rights that sets him on a collision course with the Kengis powers that be.

The Opposing Forces

Soon collaborating opposing him include the lawman the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the intimidating factory proprietor Madam Sjödahl (the actress), seen initially dismissing a newly injured laborer with minimal compensation as he remains babbling upon seeing of his pulped hand, and anyone else who benefit from a community easily swayed for a few bottles of the whisky provided by the creepy store owner Lindmark (the actor). However, in fairness, Lindmark’s eeriness diminishes once travelling artist the artist Beronius arrives in the story (Simon J Berger, providing an acting turn of rare unsettling intensity). While they remain – like the pastor himself – just slightly beyond being stereotypes, they still serve as effective ones.

Plot Progression

Once the foundations of tension planted, the moment arrives to get down to narrative business. The maid from the doctor’s house, the character Hilda (the actress), duly vanishes in the forest. Signs of her escape and animal scratches upon a trunk get discovered yet she remains completely absent. Rumours and anxieties of a man/maid-eating bear prowling the woodland spread, yet the clergyman has another theory that he and Jussi embark to prove.

A Strange Creation

To Cook a Bear is a slightly odd beast. It creates a strong impression of the desolation that allows distrust and prejudice and grim legends flourish based on local folklore that animals can be controlled or inhabited by the souls of humans. It avoids romanticise the hardscrabble life experienced by the villagers, where brutality, be it from the wild or mankind, lurks constantly on the edges, waiting to erupt. But the characters rarely become more than ciphers – or perhaps, while the conflicts between justice and revenge, rationality and religion, virtue and wickedness escalate, emblematic figures in a fable – preventing the whole thing truly coming to life.

Stylistic Shifts

Additionally, exist the many tonally jarring instances in which the clergyman’s skill to discover clues and determine the maid’s destiny becomes almost risible. He positions himself looking at shattered containers and clumps of hair within storage sheds as a fusion of the Belgian detective the English sleuth – alongside Jussi a particularly unfortunate Hastings-cum-Watson (none of whom were required to taste a blend of blood spatter and the boss’s spit to confirm that, yes, it was clearly coagulated blood on the site), before announcing his latest deduction and extracting a corpse out of a swamp.

Opposing Goals

The village elite are bent on proving that the maid was killed by an animal, maybe to preserve the peace, or possibly to shield a fellow elite. The pastor is intent on proving the opposite, and the proof so rapidly stacks up supporting his view that once more the show’s credibility and audience tolerance get strained. In its finest moments, the series evokes memories of the TV version some years back of the author’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the opposing allures and fears presented by science and belief. At its worst, it resembles Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Still, it appears to offer the response to the earlier query: “Females, choose the animal.”

• To Cook a Bear is on Disney+ now.