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An intense debate recently went viral across online platforms, following a user posed the question to women: which would you prefer find yourself stranded in the woods alongside a male or with a bear? Like all the best thought experiments, it revealed vastly opposing perspectives and experiences, highlighted chasms among genders, and could easily cause an existential crisis for anyone pondering about it for too long. There was also the predictable coda in which some males came online to inform women how stupid they were for choosing the bear and proceeded to limn the punishments they deserved for it. This at minimum allowed the women who were uncertain over their choice to make it with renewed assurance.

Portraying the Scenario

To Cook a Bear effectively dramatises this nifty little setup. The six-part series is adapted from Swedish author Mikael Niemi’s 2018 book of the same name (translated two years later for English readers). It follows the struggles of a clergyman (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his household when they arrive to begin a new ministry within Kengis, a remote settlement in northern Sweden, in 1852. In a place lacking many joys, none of the inhabitants particularly warm to his strict approach to drinking and revelry, yet it is his protection of impoverished people – particularly the native Sami population, from among whom hails the pastor’s adopted son Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in societal fairness and equality that sets him in direct opposition with the Kengis powers that be.

The Opposing Forces

Soon in cahoots opposing him are the lawman the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the intimidating mill owner the matron Sjödahl (Pernilla August), observed early on firing a recently mangled laborer with minimal compensation while he is still gibbering at the sight his crushed hand, and all others who benefit from a community easily swayed with some containers of the whisky sold by the unsettling shopkeeper the merchant Lindmark (the actor). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s creepiness diminishes once travelling artist Beronius arrives in the story (Simon J Berger, delivering an acting turn of exceptional unsettling intensity). If they are – like the pastor himself – only a little more being stereotypes, they still serve as potent archetypes.

Narrative Development

With the seeds of tension sown, the moment arrives to get down with the storyline. The servant from the doctor’s house, Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), duly vanishes from the woods. Signs of her escape and animal scratches on a tree are found but she is nowhere to be seen. Gossip and anxieties of a man/maid-eating beast roaming the woods circulate, yet the clergyman holds a different view that he and Jussi embark to verify.

An Odd Beast

To Cook a Bear is a slightly peculiar show. It conjures a fine sense of the bleakness that lets suspicion and prejudice and grim legends thrive from the native legend that animals might be dominated or inhabited by the souls of men. It avoids idealising the tough existence experienced by the residents, in which violence, whether that of nature or mankind, lurks constantly at the periphery, waiting to erupt. Yet the personas seldom evolve beyond symbols – or maybe, while the conflicts between justice and revenge, rationality and faith, virtue and evil escalate, representative characters in a fable – which stops the whole thing truly coming to life.

Stylistic Shifts

And then, there are the many tonally jarring instances in which the clergyman’s skill to discover clues and determine Hilda’s fate becomes almost risible. He positions himself looking at broken milk pots and clumps of hair within storage sheds like a combined Hercule Poirot and Sherlock Holmes – with Jussi a particularly unfortunate assistant figure (none of whom had to taste a blend of blood spatter and the boss’s spit to confirm that indeed, it was definitely dried blood at the crime scene), prior to declaring his newest conclusion and pulling a corpse out of a swamp.

Opposing Goals

The local leaders are determined demonstrating that the maid was killed by a bear, perhaps to preserve the peace, perhaps to protect a fellow elite. The clergyman is intent on proving otherwise, and the proof so rapidly accumulates in his favour that once more the drama’s plausibility and audience tolerance get strained. In its finest moments, To Cook a Bear evokes memories of the adaptation some years back of Sarah Perry’s the serpent tale, with its evocation of the opposing attractions and terrors presented by science and religion. At its worst, it’s more like a bear-themed police procedural. Still, it appears to offer the answer to the earlier query: “Females, choose the animal.”

• To Cook a Bear streams on Disney+ now.