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A intense debate recently went viral across online platforms, after someone asked the question to women: would you rather be lost in a forest alongside a male or a bear? Like all the most engaging thought experiments, it revealed wildly different worldviews and experiences, illuminated divides between the sexes, and was likely to induce an existential crisis if you thought on it for too long. Additionally, there came the predictable follow-up where men of a certain stripe took to the internet to tell women how stupid they had been to select the bear and proceeded to limn the punishments they merited for that choice. This at minimum allowed those females who had been hesitating over their choice to make it with renewed assurance.

Dramatising the Setup

To Cook a Bear effectively dramatises this clever little setup. The six-part series is adapted from Scandinavian writer the novelist’s 2018 novel with the identical title (translated two years later for English readers). It follows the struggles of a clergyman (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his family when they arrive to start a new ministry within Kengis, a remote village in northern Sweden, in 1852. In a place lacking many joys, not one of the inhabitants especially warm to his strict stance on drinking and dancing, yet it is his defense of the poor – especially the native Sami population, from among whom comes the pastor’s foster child the youth Jussi (the young actor) – and his belief in societal fairness and equality that sets him on a collision course against the Kengis powers that be.

The Opposing Forces

Soon in cahoots opposing him include the lawman the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the intimidating factory proprietor the matron Sjödahl (Pernilla August), observed early on dismissing a recently mangled worker with minimal compensation while he is still babbling upon seeing of his pulped hand, and all others who benefit from a community who can be bought for a few bottles of liquor provided by the unsettling shopkeeper the merchant Lindmark (the actor). Although, to be fair, Lindmark’s creepiness pales when travelling artist the artist Beronius appears on the scene (the performer, providing an acting turn of exceptional discomfiting power). If they are – like the pastor himself – just slightly beyond being stereotypes, they still serve as potent archetypes.

Plot Progression

With the seeds of conflict planted, it is time to proceed to narrative business. The servant employed by the doctor, the character Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), accordingly vanishes in the forest. Signs of her flight and animal scratches upon a trunk are found yet she remains completely absent. Gossip and anxieties of a man/maid-eating bear roaming the woodland spread, yet the clergyman holds a different view which he and his ward embark to prove.

An Odd Beast

This Bear Drama is a slightly peculiar show. It conjures a fine sense of the desolation that allows distrust and prejudice and grim legends thrive based on local folklore that bears might be dominated or inhabited by the souls of humans. It avoids idealising the hardscrabble life led by the residents, where violence, be it from nature or mankind, always looms at the periphery, waiting to erupt. Yet the personas rarely become more than ciphers – or perhaps, while the conflicts between justice and revenge, rationality and religion, virtue and wickedness intensify, representative characters in a fable – preventing the whole thing fully becoming immersive.

Stylistic Shifts

Additionally, exist the many tonally jarring instances where the clergyman’s skill to discover clues and determine Hilda’s fate becomes almost risible. He stands looking at broken milk pots and clumps of hair in hay barns 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 definitely coagulated blood at the crime scene), prior to declaring his latest deduction and pulling a corpse from a bog.

Opposing Goals

The local leaders are determined proving that Hilda was killed by an animal, perhaps to preserve the calm, perhaps to protect a fellow elite. The clergyman is bent on proving otherwise, and the proof so rapidly stacks up supporting his view that once more the drama’s plausibility and audience tolerance are tested. In its finest moments, To Cook a Bear is reminiscent of the adaptation a few years ago of Sarah Perry’s the serpent tale, with its evocation of the opposing attractions and fears presented by science and belief. In its low points, it resembles a bear-themed police procedural. Nevertheless, it appears to offer the answer to that debated question: “Females, choose the animal.”

• The series streams on Disney+ now.