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A heated debate recently spread widely on social media, after a user posed a query for females: would you rather be lost in the woods alongside a male or with a bear? Like all the best hypothetical scenarios, it revealed wildly different worldviews and experiences, illuminated chasms among genders, and was likely cause an existential crisis for anyone pondering on it for too long. There was also the predictable follow-up in which men of a certain stripe took to the internet to tell females how foolish they were to select the bear and proceeded to describe the punishments they deserved for it. This at least allowed those females who had been hesitating over their choice to decide with renewed assurance.

Portraying the Setup

To Cook a Bear skillfully brings to life this clever small premise. This six-episode drama is adapted from Scandinavian writer the novelist’s 2018 book with the identical title (rendered two years later for an English audience). It follows the struggles of a clergyman (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his household as they come to start a new ministry in Kengis, a remote settlement in Sweden’s north, during the mid-19th century. Within a community lacking many joys, not one of the inhabitants particularly warm to his puritanical approach to drinking and revelry, yet it is his protection of impoverished people – particularly the indigenous Sami, from among whom hails the preacher’s adopted son Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in social justice and equal rights that sets him in direct opposition against the Kengis powers that be.

The Opposing Forces

Quickly collaborating against him include the lawman Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the intimidating mill owner Madam Sjödahl (Pernilla August), observed early on firing a recently mangled laborer with minimal compensation while he is still babbling upon seeing of his pulped hand, and all others who profit from a community easily swayed with some containers of the whisky provided by the creepy shopkeeper Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). Although, to be fair, Lindmark’s creepiness diminishes once itinerant painter Beronius appears in the story (Simon J Berger, delivering a performance of exceptional discomfiting power). If they are – similar to the clergyman – just slightly beyond being stereotypes, they still serve as effective ones.

Plot Progression

Once the foundations of conflict planted, the moment arrives to get down to narrative business. The maid from the doctor’s house, Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), duly vanishes in the forest. Signs of her flight and animal scratches upon a trunk get discovered but she is nowhere to be seen. Gossip and anxieties regarding a human-devouring beast prowling the woodland circulate, but the pastor has another theory which he and his ward set out to prove.

A Strange Creation

This Bear Drama is a slightly odd beast. It conjures a strong impression of the desolation that lets suspicion and prejudice and dark myths flourish based on local folklore that bears can be controlled or possessed by the spirits of humans. And it doesn’t idealising the hardscrabble life led by the villagers, in which violence, whether that of the wild or mankind, always looms at the periphery, poised to explode. But the characters rarely become more than ciphers – or perhaps, as the struggles amid fairness and vengeance, logic and faith, good and wickedness escalate, emblematic figures within a moral tale – preventing the whole thing truly becoming immersive.

Stylistic Shifts

And then, exist numerous tonally jarring instances in which the pastor’s ability to discover clues and discern the maid’s destiny becomes nearly laughable. He stands looking at broken milk pots and clumps of hair within storage sheds as a fusion of the Belgian detective the English sleuth – with Jussi a particularly unfortunate assistant figure (none of whom had to lick a blend of blood droplets and saliva from his superior to confirm that indeed, it was definitely dried blood at the crime scene), prior to declaring his latest deduction and extracting a corpse from a bog.

Opposing Goals

The village elite are bent on demonstrating that the maid met her end by an animal, perhaps to protect the peace, perhaps to shield a fellow elite. The clergyman is bent on establishing the opposite, and the proof so quickly accumulates supporting his view that once more the show’s credibility and the viewer’s patience are tested. At its best, To Cook a Bear evokes memories of the adaptation some years back of Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the competing allures and fears offered by science and religion. In its low points, it resembles a bear-themed police procedural. Nevertheless, it does seem to offer the response to that debated question: “Females, choose the animal.”

• To Cook a Bear streams on Disney+ currently.