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An intense discussion lately went viral across online platforms, after a user asked the question for females: would you rather find yourself stranded in the woods with a man or a bear? Like all the most engaging thought experiments, it revealed vastly opposing worldviews and life encounters, highlighted divides among genders, and could easily cause an existential crisis for anyone pondering about it extensively. There was also the predictable coda in which some males took to the internet to inform females how foolish they were to select the bear and proceeded to describe the punishments they deserved for it. This at least allowed the women who were uncertain about their decision to decide with renewed assurance.

Portraying the Setup

To Cook a Bear effectively dramatises this clever small premise. This six-episode series is based from Swedish author Mikael Niemi’s 2018 book with the identical title (rendered in 2020 for English readers). It traces the tribulations of a clergyman (the lead actor) and his household when they arrive to begin a new ministry within Kengis, an isolated settlement in northern Sweden, in 1852. Within a community lacking many joys, not one of the inhabitants especially appreciate his puritanical stance on alcohol and revelry, but it is his protection of the poor – particularly the indigenous Sami, from which comes the preacher’s adopted son the youth Jussi (the young actor) – and his belief in societal fairness and equal rights that sets him on a collision course with the Kengis powers that be.

The Antagonists

Soon in cahoots against him include the lawman Brahe (the performer), the fearsome factory proprietor the matron Sjödahl (the actress), seen initially firing a newly injured laborer with minimal compensation as he remains babbling at the sight of his pulped hand, and anyone else who benefit from a populace who can be bought with some containers of liquor provided by the unsettling shopkeeper Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). Although, to be fair, Lindmark’s eeriness diminishes when itinerant painter Beronius arrives on the scene (Simon J Berger, delivering an acting turn of exceptional unsettling intensity). If they are – similar to the clergyman – just slightly beyond being stereotypes, they still serve as effective ones.

Narrative Development

With the seeds of tension sown, it is time to proceed with the storyline. The servant from the doctor’s house, Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), duly goes missing in the forest. Indications of her escape and bear markings upon a trunk get discovered but she is nowhere to be seen. Rumours and fears of a man/maid-eating beast prowling the woodland spread, yet the clergyman has another theory which he and his ward embark to prove.

An Odd Beast

This Bear Drama is a slightly odd beast. It creates a strong impression of the bleakness that lets suspicion and prejudice and grim legends flourish from the native legend that bears might be dominated or inhabited by the spirits of humans. And it doesn’t romanticise the tough existence experienced by the residents, where violence, be it from the wild or people, always looms on the edges, poised to explode. Yet the personas rarely become beyond symbols – or maybe, while the conflicts between justice and revenge, rationality and religion, good and wickedness escalate, emblematic figures within a moral tale – which stops the whole thing fully becoming immersive.

Tonal Inconsistencies

Additionally, there are the many stylistically clashing instances where the clergyman’s skill to discover clues and discern Hilda’s fate turns almost risible. He positions himself observing shattered containers and clumps of hair in hay barns as a fusion of Hercule Poirot the English sleuth – with Jussi a particularly unfortunate Hastings-cum-Watson (none of whom were required to lick a mixture of blood droplets and the boss’s spit to agree that, yes, it was clearly dried blood at the crime scene), before announcing his latest deduction and pulling a body from a bog.

Opposing Goals

The village elite are bent on demonstrating that the maid met her end by an animal, perhaps to preserve the calm, or possibly to shield a fellow elite. The clergyman is intent on proving otherwise, and the proof so rapidly accumulates in his favour that once more the show’s credibility and audience tolerance are tested. In its finest moments, 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 attractions and terrors offered by science and religion. At its worst, it resembles Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Nevertheless, it does seem to provide the answer to that debated question: “Females, choose the animal.”

• To Cook a Bear is on Disney+ now.