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An intense debate recently spread widely on social media, following a user posed a query to women: which would you prefer be lost in the woods alongside a male or a bear? Similar to the most engaging hypothetical scenarios, it revealed wildly different perspectives and experiences, highlighted divides between the sexes, and was likely to induce an existential crisis if you thought about it extensively. There was also the almost inevitable coda in which men of a certain stripe came online to inform females how foolish they were for choosing the bear and proceeded to describe the consequences they deserved for that choice. This at minimum allowed the women who had been hesitating over their choice to make it with a new confidence.

Portraying the Scenario

To Cook a Bear effectively dramatises this clever little setup. This six-episode series is adapted from Scandinavian writer the novelist’s 2018 book of the same name (translated in 2020 for English readers). It follows the tribulations of a clergyman (the lead actor) and his family as they come to begin a fresh religious post in Kengis, an isolated village in northern Sweden, during the mid-19th century. Within a community lacking many joys, none of the locals especially appreciate his strict approach to alcohol and revelry, yet it is his defense of the poor – especially the indigenous Sami, from which hails the pastor’s adopted son Jussi (the young actor) – and his conviction in societal fairness and equality that places him in direct opposition with the Kengis powers that be.

The Opposing Forces

Quickly in cahoots against him include the lawman the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the fearsome factory proprietor Madam Sjödahl (Pernilla August), observed initially firing a newly injured laborer with a month’s pay as he remains babbling upon seeing of his pulped hand, and anyone else who profit from a populace who can be bought for a few bottles of liquor sold by the unsettling shopkeeper Lindmark (the actor). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s eeriness diminishes once itinerant painter Beronius arrives in the story (Simon J Berger, delivering a performance of rare discomfiting power). While they remain – similar to the clergyman – only a little more than caricatures, they still serve as effective ones.

Plot Progression

Once the foundations of conflict sown, the moment arrives to get down to narrative business. The maid employed by the doctor, Hilda (the actress), duly vanishes in the forest. Signs of her flight and animal scratches on a tree get discovered yet she remains completely absent. Gossip and anxieties of a man/maid-eating beast roaming the woodland circulate, yet the clergyman holds a different view that he and Jussi embark to verify.

An Odd Beast

To Cook a Bear is a somewhat peculiar show. It creates a fine sense of the bleakness that lets suspicion and prejudice and dark myths flourish from the native legend that bears might be dominated or inhabited by the souls of men. It avoids idealising the hardscrabble life led by the villagers, in which brutality, whether that of the wild or mankind, lurks constantly on the edges, poised to explode. Yet the personas seldom evolve beyond symbols – or perhaps, as the struggles between justice and vengeance, logic and faith, virtue and evil escalate, representative characters within a moral tale – preventing the whole thing fully coming to life.

Tonal Inconsistencies

Additionally, there are the many stylistically clashing instances where the clergyman’s skill in finding evidence and discern Hilda’s fate turns nearly laughable. He positions himself observing broken milk pots and clumps of hair in hay barns as a fusion of Hercule Poirot and Sherlock Holmes – with Jussi a rather hapless assistant figure (neither of whom were required to lick a blend of blood spatter and the boss’s spit to agree that indeed, it was clearly coagulated blood at the crime scene), before announcing his newest conclusion and extracting a corpse from a bog.

Clashing Agendas

The village elite are bent on proving that the maid was killed by a bear, perhaps to preserve the peace, or possibly to shield one of their own. The pastor is bent on proving otherwise, and the proof so rapidly stacks up in his favour that once more the drama’s plausibility and the viewer’s patience are tested. In its finest moments, the series evokes memories of the TV version a few years ago of the author’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the competing allures and fears offered by rational thought and religion. In its low points, it resembles a bear-themed police procedural. Still, it appears to offer the response to that debated question: “Ladies, take the bear.”

• To Cook a Bear streams on Disney+ currently.