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A intense discussion recently went viral on social media, following a user asked the question to women: would you rather be lost in a forest with a man or with a bear? Like all the most engaging thought experiments, it revealed vastly opposing worldviews and life encounters, highlighted chasms between the sexes, and was likely cause a deep personal dilemma for anyone pondering about it extensively. Additionally, there came the almost inevitable follow-up where men of a certain stripe came online to inform females how foolish they were to select the bear and proceeded to limn the punishments they merited for it. This at minimum allowed the women who were uncertain over their choice to make it with renewed assurance.

Dramatising the Scenario

To Cook a Bear effectively brings to life this nifty little setup. This six-episode drama 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 tribulations of a pastor (the lead actor) and his household when they arrive to start a new ministry within Kengis, an isolated village in Sweden’s north, in 1852. In a place with few pleasures, none of the inhabitants particularly appreciate his strict approach to alcohol and dancing, but it is his defense of impoverished people – particularly the native Sami population, from which comes the pastor’s foster child Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in social justice and equality that places him on a collision course with the Kengis powers that be.

The Antagonists

Soon in cahoots against him include the lawman the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the fearsome factory proprietor Madam Sjödahl (Pernilla August), observed initially firing a recently mangled worker with a month’s pay while he is still gibbering upon seeing of his pulped hand, and all others who profit from a populace easily swayed with some containers of the whisky provided by the unsettling shopkeeper Lindmark (the actor). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s creepiness diminishes when travelling artist the artist Beronius arrives on the scene (the performer, delivering an acting turn of exceptional discomfiting power). If they are – like the pastor himself – only a little more being stereotypes, they still serve as effective ones.

Narrative Development

Once the foundations of tension sown, it is time to proceed with the storyline. The maid employed by the doctor, the character Hilda (the actress), accordingly goes missing from the woods. Signs of her flight and animal scratches upon a trunk are found yet she remains nowhere to be seen. Rumours and fears of a man/maid-eating beast prowling the woodland spread, yet the clergyman holds a different view that he and Jussi set out to verify.

An Odd Beast

To Cook a Bear is a somewhat peculiar show. It conjures a fine sense of the bleakness that lets distrust and prejudice and dark myths thrive from the native legend that animals might be dominated or inhabited by the souls of humans. And it doesn’t romanticise the tough existence experienced by the residents, in which brutality, whether that of nature or mankind, always looms at the periphery, waiting to erupt. But the characters rarely become beyond symbols – or maybe, while the conflicts amid fairness and vengeance, rationality and religion, good and evil intensify, emblematic figures within a moral tale – preventing the whole thing truly coming to life.

Stylistic Shifts

And then, there are numerous tonally jarring instances in which the pastor’s ability to discover clues and determine Hilda’s fate becomes nearly laughable. He stands observing shattered containers and strands of fur within storage sheds like a combined the Belgian detective the English sleuth – alongside Jussi a rather hapless assistant figure (none of whom had to taste a blend of blood droplets and the boss’s spit to confirm that indeed, it was definitely coagulated blood on the site), prior to declaring his latest deduction and pulling a body from a bog.

Clashing Agendas

The village elite are bent on proving that Hilda was killed by an animal, maybe to preserve the calm, perhaps to protect one of their own. The clergyman is bent on establishing otherwise, and the proof so quickly stacks up in his favour that again the show’s credibility and audience tolerance are tested. At its best, the series is reminiscent of the TV version a few years ago of Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the opposing attractions and terrors presented by rational thought and belief. At its worst, it resembles a bear-themed police procedural. Nevertheless, it does seem to offer the answer to that debated question: “Ladies, take the bear.”

• The series is on Disney+ currently.