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A intense discussion recently went viral across online platforms, following someone asked a query for females: which would you prefer be lost in the woods with a man or a bear? Similar to the most engaging thought experiments, it exposed wildly different worldviews and experiences, illuminated divides between the sexes, and was likely cause a deep personal dilemma for anyone pondering on it extensively. Additionally, there came the predictable coda where some males came online to inform women how stupid they were for choosing the animal and went on to limn the punishments they merited for that choice. This at least allowed the women who had been hesitating about their decision to make it with a new confidence.

Dramatising the Scenario

To Cook a Bear effectively brings to life this nifty little setup. The six-part drama is based on Swedish author the novelist’s 2018 book of the same name (rendered two years later for an English audience). It follows the tribulations of a pastor (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his family when they arrive to start a fresh religious post in Kengis, a remote village in northern Sweden, in 1852. Within a community lacking many joys, not one of the inhabitants particularly appreciate his strict approach to drinking and revelry, but it is his defense of impoverished people – especially the native Sami population, from which comes the pastor’s foster child Jussi (the young actor) – and his conviction in societal fairness and equal rights that places him in direct opposition with the Kengis powers that be.

The Antagonists

Quickly collaborating against him are the lawman Brahe (the performer), the intimidating mill owner the matron Sjödahl (Pernilla August), seen early on dismissing a newly injured worker with minimal compensation while he is still babbling at the sight his crushed hand, and anyone else who profit from a community who can be bought with some containers of the whisky sold by the unsettling store owner the merchant Lindmark (the actor). However, in fairness, Lindmark’s creepiness diminishes when travelling artist Beronius appears on the scene (Simon J Berger, delivering an acting turn of rare discomfiting power). If they are – like the pastor himself – only a little more being stereotypes, they are at least effective ones.

Plot Progression

Once the foundations of conflict planted, the moment arrives to proceed to narrative business. The maid employed by the doctor, the character Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), duly vanishes from the woods. Signs of her escape and bear markings on a tree get discovered but she is nowhere to be seen. Rumours and anxieties of a man/maid-eating beast roaming the woods spread, but the pastor holds a different view which he and his ward set out to verify.

An Odd Beast

To Cook a Bear is a somewhat peculiar show. It creates a strong impression of the bleakness that allows suspicion and bias and dark myths flourish from the native legend that animals can be controlled or inhabited by the souls of men. And it doesn’t idealising the hardscrabble life led by the villagers, in which brutality, whether that of the wild or mankind, always looms at the periphery, waiting to erupt. But the characters rarely become more than ciphers – or maybe, while the conflicts between justice and revenge, logic and religion, virtue and evil intensify, emblematic figures in a fable – which stops the entire production fully coming to life.

Stylistic Shifts

Additionally, exist the many stylistically clashing instances in which the pastor’s ability to discover clues and discern Hilda’s fate becomes nearly laughable. He positions himself looking at shattered containers and clumps of hair in hay barns as a fusion of the Belgian detective and Sherlock Holmes – with Jussi a particularly unfortunate Hastings-cum-Watson (neither of whom were required to lick a mixture of blood droplets and saliva from his superior to confirm that indeed, it was clearly coagulated blood at the crime scene), before announcing his newest conclusion and pulling a corpse from a bog.

Clashing Agendas

The village elite are bent on demonstrating that the maid met her end by a bear, perhaps to preserve the peace, or possibly to protect a fellow elite. The clergyman is intent on proving the opposite, and the proof so rapidly stacks up in his favour that again the show’s credibility and audience tolerance are tested. In its finest moments, the series evokes memories of the TV version some years back of the author’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the opposing attractions and terrors offered by science and belief. At its worst, it’s more like Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Nevertheless, it does seem to offer the answer to that debated question: “Ladies, take the bear.”

• To Cook a Bear streams on Disney+ now.