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An intense debate recently went viral across online platforms, after a user posed a query for females: would you rather find yourself stranded in a forest with a man or a bear? Like all the most engaging thought experiments, it revealed vastly opposing perspectives and life encounters, highlighted divides between the sexes, and could easily cause a deep personal dilemma if you thought on it extensively. There was also the almost inevitable follow-up where some males came online to inform women how foolish they were for choosing the animal and proceeded to limn the punishments they deserved for it. This at minimum enabled those females who had been hesitating over their choice to decide with a new confidence.

Portraying the Setup

To Cook a Bear skillfully brings to life this clever small premise. This six-episode series is based on Scandinavian writer the novelist’s 2018 book with the identical title (rendered two years later for an English audience). It traces the struggles of a clergyman (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his family when they arrive to start a fresh religious post within Kengis, an isolated village in Sweden’s north, in 1852. Within a community with few pleasures, not one of the locals particularly appreciate his puritanical stance on alcohol and revelry, but it is his defense of impoverished people – particularly the indigenous Sami, from among whom hails the preacher’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 local authorities.

The Opposing Forces

Quickly collaborating opposing him are the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the fearsome mill owner the matron Sjödahl (Pernilla August), observed initially dismissing a newly injured worker with minimal compensation while he is still gibbering at the sight his crushed hand, and all others who profit from a community who can be bought with some containers of the whisky provided by the creepy store owner Lindmark (the actor). Although, to be fair, Lindmark’s eeriness diminishes once travelling artist the artist Beronius arrives on the scene (Simon J Berger, providing an acting turn of rare unsettling intensity). If they are – similar to the clergyman – only a little more than caricatures, they are at least effective ones.

Plot Progression

Once the foundations of tension planted, it is time to proceed to narrative business. The servant employed by the doctor, Hilda (the actress), duly goes missing from the woods. Signs of her escape and bear markings on a tree get discovered yet she remains nowhere to be seen. Gossip and anxieties of a man/maid-eating beast roaming the woodland spread, but the pastor holds a different view that he and Jussi set out to verify.

A Strange Creation

To Cook a Bear is a somewhat odd beast. It creates 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 possessed by the spirits of men. And it doesn’t idealising the tough existence experienced by the villagers, in which brutality, be it from nature or people, always looms on the edges, poised to explode. But the characters rarely become beyond symbols – or perhaps, as the struggles amid fairness and vengeance, rationality and faith, good and evil intensify, emblematic figures in a fable – preventing the entire production truly becoming immersive.

Stylistic Shifts

And then, there are numerous tonally jarring instances where the clergyman’s skill to discover clues and discern the maid’s destiny turns nearly laughable. He stands observing broken milk pots and strands of fur in hay barns as a fusion of the Belgian detective and Sherlock Holmes – alongside Jussi a rather hapless assistant figure (none of whom had to lick a mixture of blood droplets and the boss’s spit to confirm that indeed, it was definitely dried blood at the crime scene), before announcing his latest deduction and extracting a corpse from a bog.

Clashing Agendas

The village elite are determined demonstrating that the maid met her end by a bear, perhaps to preserve the calm, perhaps to shield a fellow elite. The clergyman is bent on proving otherwise, and the proof so quickly stacks up supporting his view that once more the drama’s plausibility and audience tolerance get strained. In its finest moments, the series is reminiscent of the TV version a few years ago of the author’s The Essex Serpent, through its portrayal of the opposing attractions and terrors offered by rational thought and religion. At its worst, it resembles a bear-themed police procedural. Nevertheless, it appears to provide the answer to the earlier query: “Females, choose the animal.”

• To Cook a Bear streams on Disney+ now.