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An intense discussion recently spread widely on social media, after someone posed the question to women: which would you prefer find yourself stranded in a forest with a man or with a bear? Like all the best hypothetical scenarios, it exposed wildly different worldviews and experiences, highlighted divides between the sexes, and could easily to induce an existential crisis if you thought about it extensively. There was also the almost inevitable coda where some males came online to inform women how stupid they had been for choosing the bear and proceeded to describe the punishments they deserved for that choice. This at minimum enabled those females who had been hesitating about their decision to make it with a new confidence.

Dramatising the Scenario

To Cook a Bear skillfully brings to life this nifty small premise. The six-part drama is adapted on Scandinavian writer Mikael Niemi’s 2018 book with the identical title (translated in 2020 for English readers). It traces the struggles of a clergyman (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his household when they arrive to begin a fresh religious post in Kengis, a remote settlement in Sweden’s north, in 1852. In a place with few pleasures, not one of the inhabitants particularly warm to his strict approach to drinking and revelry, but it is his protection of impoverished people – especially the indigenous Sami, from among whom hails the preacher’s adopted son Jussi (the young actor) – and his belief in social justice and equality that places him on a collision course against the Kengis powers that be.

The Antagonists

Soon in cahoots opposing him include the sheriff the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the intimidating factory proprietor the matron Sjödahl (the actress), seen early on firing a recently mangled laborer with a month’s pay as he remains gibbering at the sight of his pulped hand, and anyone else who benefit from a community easily swayed for a few bottles of liquor sold by the unsettling store owner Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). However, in fairness, Lindmark’s creepiness diminishes once itinerant painter Beronius arrives in the story (the performer, providing an acting turn of rare discomfiting power). While they remain – like the pastor himself – only a little more being stereotypes, they still serve as potent archetypes.

Plot Progression

Once the foundations of tension sown, it is time to proceed to narrative business. The maid from the doctor’s house, the character Hilda (the actress), accordingly vanishes in the forest. Signs of her flight and animal scratches on a tree are found yet she remains nowhere to be seen. Rumours and anxieties of a man/maid-eating bear roaming the woods spread, yet the clergyman holds a different view which he and his ward set out to verify.

An Odd Beast

This Bear Drama is a slightly odd beast. It conjures a fine sense of the bleakness that lets suspicion and bias and dark myths thrive from the native legend that bears might be dominated or inhabited by the spirits of men. And it doesn’t idealising the hardscrabble life experienced by the villagers, in which brutality, be it from the wild or people, lurks constantly at the periphery, waiting to erupt. Yet the personas seldom evolve beyond symbols – or maybe, while the conflicts amid fairness and vengeance, logic and faith, virtue and evil escalate, representative characters within a moral tale – preventing the entire production fully becoming immersive.

Tonal Inconsistencies

And then, there are the many stylistically clashing instances where the pastor’s ability in finding evidence and discern Hilda’s fate becomes nearly laughable. He positions himself observing shattered containers and strands of fur in hay barns as a fusion of the Belgian detective the English sleuth – with Jussi a rather hapless Hastings-cum-Watson (neither of whom had to lick a blend of blood droplets and the boss’s spit to confirm that, yes, it was definitely dried blood on the site), before announcing his newest conclusion and pulling a corpse from a bog.

Opposing Goals

The village elite are bent on proving that the maid met her end by a bear, perhaps to protect the calm, perhaps to shield one of their own. The pastor is intent on proving the opposite, and the evidence so quickly accumulates supporting his view that again the show’s credibility and the viewer’s patience get strained. In its finest moments, the series evokes memories of the TV version a few years ago of Sarah Perry’s the serpent tale, with its evocation of the opposing allures and terrors presented by science and belief. At its worst, it’s more like a bear-themed police procedural. Still, it appears to offer the response to the earlier query: “Females, choose the animal.”

• To Cook a Bear streams on Disney+ now.