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A heated discussion lately went viral on social media, after someone posed a query to women: would you rather be lost in the woods with a man or a bear? Like all the best hypothetical scenarios, it revealed vastly opposing worldviews and life encounters, highlighted divides between the sexes, and was likely cause an existential crisis if you thought on it extensively. There was also the predictable coda where men of a certain stripe took to the internet to inform females how foolish they were to select the bear and proceeded to describe the consequences they merited for that choice. This at least allowed the women who were uncertain over their choice to make it with renewed assurance.

Dramatising the Setup

To Cook a Bear skillfully brings to life this clever little setup. This six-episode drama is adapted from Scandinavian writer Mikael Niemi’s 2018 novel with the identical title (rendered in 2020 for English readers). It follows the struggles of a pastor (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his family as they come to begin a fresh religious post in Kengis, an isolated settlement in northern Sweden, during the mid-19th century. Within a community with few pleasures, not one of the locals particularly warm to his puritanical approach to drinking and revelry, yet it is his defense of the poor – particularly the indigenous Sami, from which hails the preacher’s foster child Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in social justice and equality that places him on a collision course with the Kengis local authorities.

The Antagonists

Soon in cahoots against him include the sheriff the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the fearsome factory proprietor the matron Sjödahl (Pernilla August), observed initially firing a newly injured worker with minimal compensation while he is still gibbering upon seeing his crushed hand, and anyone else who benefit from a community who can be bought with some containers of the whisky provided by the creepy shopkeeper the merchant Lindmark (the actor). However, in fairness, Lindmark’s eeriness diminishes when travelling artist the artist Beronius arrives in the story (Simon J Berger, providing a performance of exceptional discomfiting power). If they are – similar to the clergyman – only a little more being stereotypes, they are at least effective ones.

Narrative Development

With the seeds of tension planted, the moment arrives to proceed with the storyline. The maid from the doctor’s house, the character Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), accordingly vanishes in the forest. Indications 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 prowling the woodland spread, but the pastor has another theory which he and his ward embark to prove.

An Odd Beast

To Cook a Bear is a slightly peculiar show. It conjures a fine sense of the desolation that lets suspicion and prejudice and dark myths flourish from the native legend that bears might be dominated or possessed by the souls of humans. And it doesn’t romanticise the hardscrabble life experienced by the villagers, in which brutality, be it from the wild or mankind, always looms on the edges, poised to explode. But the characters rarely become beyond symbols – or maybe, while the conflicts between justice and vengeance, rationality and religion, virtue and evil intensify, representative characters in a fable – preventing the whole thing fully coming to life.

Tonal Inconsistencies

Additionally, there are the many stylistically clashing instances in which the pastor’s ability to discover clues and discern the maid’s destiny turns nearly laughable. He positions himself observing broken milk pots and strands of fur in hay barns like a combined Hercule Poirot and Sherlock Holmes – with Jussi a rather hapless Hastings-cum-Watson (neither of whom were required to lick a blend of blood droplets and saliva from his superior to agree that indeed, it was clearly coagulated blood on the site), prior to declaring his newest conclusion and extracting a body from a bog.

Clashing Agendas

The local leaders are determined demonstrating that Hilda met her end by a bear, perhaps to protect the calm, perhaps to protect one of their own. The pastor is intent on proving otherwise, and the proof so rapidly stacks up in his favour that once more the show’s credibility and the viewer’s patience get strained. At its best, the series evokes memories of the TV version some years back of Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the competing allures and terrors offered by rational thought and belief. At its worst, it’s more like Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Still, it appears to offer the answer to the earlier query: “Females, choose the animal.”

• The series is on Disney+ now.