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A intense debate lately spread widely across online platforms, after someone posed a query to women: which would you prefer be lost in the woods with a man or with a bear? Like all the most engaging thought experiments, it exposed vastly opposing perspectives and life encounters, illuminated divides among genders, and could easily to induce an existential crisis if you thought about it extensively. There was also the almost inevitable follow-up where some males came online to inform women how stupid they had been for choosing the animal and proceeded to limn the consequences they merited for that choice. This at minimum allowed the women who were uncertain about their decision to decide with renewed assurance.

Dramatising the Setup

To Cook a Bear effectively dramatises this nifty little setup. This six-episode series is based from Scandinavian writer the novelist’s 2018 book with the identical title (translated two years later for English readers). It traces the struggles of a pastor (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his household when they arrive to begin a fresh religious post within Kengis, an isolated village in Sweden’s north, during the mid-19th century. In a place with few pleasures, none of the inhabitants particularly warm to his strict approach to drinking and dancing, but it is his defense of impoverished people – particularly the indigenous Sami, from among whom hails the pastor’s foster child the youth Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his conviction in social justice and equality that sets him on a collision course against the Kengis local authorities.

The Opposing Forces

Quickly in cahoots against him include the lawman Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the intimidating factory proprietor the matron Sjödahl (Pernilla August), seen initially firing a recently mangled laborer with a month’s pay while he is still gibbering at the sight of his pulped hand, and all others who profit from a community who can be bought for a few bottles of liquor provided by the creepy shopkeeper the merchant Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). Although, to be fair, Lindmark’s creepiness pales once itinerant painter the artist Beronius appears on the scene (the performer, delivering an acting turn of exceptional discomfiting power). While they remain – like the pastor himself – just slightly beyond being stereotypes, they are at least potent archetypes.

Plot Progression

With the seeds of conflict planted, it is time to proceed to narrative business. The servant employed by the doctor, the character Hilda (the actress), accordingly vanishes in the forest. Signs of her flight and bear markings upon a trunk are found but she is nowhere to be seen. Rumours and anxieties of a man/maid-eating bear roaming the woodland spread, yet the clergyman holds a different view that he and Jussi set out to verify.

A Strange Creation

This Bear Drama is a somewhat peculiar show. It conjures a fine sense of the bleakness that lets distrust and prejudice and dark myths thrive based on local folklore that bears might be dominated or inhabited by the spirits of men. It avoids idealising the hardscrabble life led by the residents, where brutality, whether that of the wild or mankind, always looms at the periphery, poised to explode. Yet the personas seldom evolve more than ciphers – or perhaps, while the conflicts amid fairness and revenge, logic and religion, good and wickedness intensify, representative characters within a moral tale – preventing the whole thing truly coming to life.

Tonal Inconsistencies

And then, there are numerous stylistically clashing moments in which the pastor’s ability to discover clues and determine the maid’s destiny turns nearly laughable. He positions himself looking at shattered containers and clumps of hair in hay barns like a combined Hercule Poirot the English sleuth – alongside Jussi a rather hapless assistant figure (none of whom had to lick a blend of blood droplets and saliva from his superior to agree that, yes, it was definitely dried blood on the site), prior to declaring his newest conclusion and extracting a corpse out of a swamp.

Opposing Goals

The village elite are determined demonstrating that the maid was killed by an animal, maybe to preserve the calm, or possibly to protect a fellow elite. The pastor is bent on establishing the opposite, and the evidence so quickly stacks up supporting his view that again the drama’s plausibility and audience tolerance are tested. At its best, To Cook a Bear evokes memories of the adaptation a few years ago of Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the competing allures and terrors presented by science and religion. In its low points, it resembles a bear-themed police procedural. Still, it does seem to offer the response to that debated question: “Ladies, take the bear.”

• The series is on Disney+ now.