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An intense debate recently went viral across online platforms, after someone asked a query for females: would you rather be lost in the woods with a man or a bear? Like all the most engaging hypothetical scenarios, it revealed wildly different perspectives and experiences, illuminated chasms between the sexes, and was likely to induce a deep personal dilemma if you thought about it extensively. Additionally, there came the almost inevitable coda where men of a certain stripe came online to tell women how foolish they were to select the animal and proceeded to limn the punishments they deserved for that choice. This at least allowed those females who had been hesitating over their choice to make it with renewed assurance.

Dramatising the Setup

To Cook a Bear skillfully dramatises this clever little setup. The six-part series is adapted from Scandinavian writer Mikael Niemi’s 2018 novel with the identical title (translated two years later for English readers). It follows the struggles of a clergyman (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his household as they come to begin a fresh religious post within Kengis, a remote village in northern Sweden, during the mid-19th century. In a place lacking many joys, not one of the locals especially appreciate his puritanical approach to drinking and dancing, yet it is his protection of impoverished people – especially the native Sami population, from which hails the preacher’s foster child Jussi (the young actor) – and his belief in social justice and equality that places him in direct opposition against the Kengis powers that be.

The Opposing Forces

Soon collaborating against him are the lawman the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the fearsome factory proprietor the matron Sjödahl (Pernilla August), seen initially firing a recently mangled laborer with minimal compensation while he is still gibbering upon seeing his crushed hand, and anyone else who benefit from a populace easily swayed for a few bottles of the whisky sold by the unsettling shopkeeper Lindmark (the actor). Although, in fairness, Lindmark’s eeriness diminishes once travelling artist the artist Beronius arrives on the scene (Simon J Berger, delivering a performance of rare discomfiting power). While they remain – like the pastor himself – only a little more than caricatures, they still serve as potent archetypes.

Narrative Development

Once the foundations of tension sown, it is time to proceed to narrative business. The servant from the doctor’s house, the character Hilda (the actress), duly vanishes from the woods. Indications of her flight and bear markings on a tree are found but she is nowhere to be seen. Gossip and anxieties of a man/maid-eating bear prowling the woodland circulate, yet the clergyman has another theory which he and his ward embark to verify.

A Strange Creation

To Cook a Bear is a slightly peculiar show. It conjures a fine sense of the desolation that lets suspicion and bias and dark myths thrive from the native legend that bears can be controlled or inhabited by the spirits of humans. It avoids idealising the tough existence led by the residents, in which violence, whether that of nature or mankind, always looms on the edges, poised to explode. But the characters seldom evolve beyond symbols – or perhaps, as the struggles amid fairness and revenge, logic and faith, virtue and wickedness intensify, emblematic figures within a moral tale – preventing the entire production truly becoming immersive.

Tonal Inconsistencies

And then, there are numerous tonally jarring instances where the clergyman’s skill in finding evidence and discern the maid’s destiny becomes nearly laughable. He positions himself observing broken milk pots and clumps of hair in hay barns like a combined Hercule Poirot and Sherlock Holmes – alongside Jussi a rather hapless assistant figure (none of whom had to lick a mixture of blood droplets and saliva from his superior to agree 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 village elite are bent on demonstrating that the maid met her end by an animal, maybe to protect the peace, perhaps to protect a fellow elite. The clergyman is bent on proving the opposite, and the evidence so rapidly accumulates in his favour that once more the drama’s plausibility and audience tolerance get strained. At its best, the series evokes memories of the TV version some years back of Sarah Perry’s the serpent tale, with its evocation of the competing attractions and fears offered by rational thought and religion. At its worst, it resembles a bear-themed police procedural. Nevertheless, it does seem to provide the response to that debated question: “Ladies, take the bear.”

• To Cook a Bear streams on Disney+ currently.