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An heated debate recently spread widely across online platforms, after someone posed a query to women: would you rather find yourself stranded in the woods with a man or with a bear? Similar to the best hypothetical scenarios, it exposed wildly different worldviews and experiences, highlighted divides among genders, and was likely cause an existential crisis if you thought about it extensively. Additionally, there came the almost inevitable follow-up where men of a certain stripe came online to inform women how stupid they were to select the bear and went on to describe the consequences they merited for that choice. This at minimum allowed those females who were uncertain about their decision to decide with renewed assurance.

Dramatising the Setup

To Cook a Bear effectively brings to life this nifty little setup. This six-episode drama is adapted on Scandinavian writer the novelist’s 2018 novel with the identical title (rendered in 2020 for an English audience). It follows the tribulations of a clergyman (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his family as they come to begin a fresh religious post in Kengis, a remote village in Sweden’s north, in 1852. Within a community with few pleasures, not one of the inhabitants especially appreciate his puritanical stance on alcohol and dancing, but it is his defense of the poor – especially the native Sami population, from which comes the pastor’s adopted son Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in social justice and equality that places him in direct opposition against the Kengis powers that be.

The Antagonists

Quickly collaborating against him include the lawman the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the intimidating mill owner Madam Sjödahl (Pernilla August), seen initially firing a recently mangled laborer with a month’s pay while he is still babbling at the sight of his pulped hand, and all others who benefit from a community easily swayed for a few bottles of the whisky provided by the unsettling store owner the merchant Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s eeriness pales once travelling artist the artist Beronius appears on the scene (the performer, providing a performance of rare unsettling intensity). If they are – like the pastor himself – just slightly beyond being stereotypes, they still serve as potent archetypes.

Narrative Development

With the seeds of tension sown, it is time to proceed to narrative business. The maid employed by the doctor, Hilda (the actress), duly goes missing from the woods. Signs of her flight and bear markings upon a trunk get discovered but she is nowhere to be seen. Gossip and fears regarding a human-devouring beast roaming the woodland circulate, but the pastor has another theory that he and Jussi set out to prove.

A Strange Creation

To Cook a Bear is a slightly peculiar show. It conjures a fine sense of the bleakness that allows distrust and bias and grim legends flourish from the native legend that animals might be dominated or possessed by the spirits of men. It avoids idealising the hardscrabble life experienced by the villagers, in which brutality, be it from the wild or mankind, lurks constantly on the edges, waiting to erupt. Yet the personas rarely become more than ciphers – or perhaps, while the conflicts between justice and vengeance, rationality and religion, virtue and evil intensify, representative characters in a fable – preventing the whole thing truly coming to life.

Stylistic Shifts

Additionally, there are numerous stylistically clashing instances where the pastor’s ability in finding evidence and determine the maid’s destiny becomes nearly laughable. He stands looking at broken milk pots and strands of fur within storage sheds as a fusion of the Belgian detective and Sherlock Holmes – alongside Jussi a rather hapless Hastings-cum-Watson (none of whom were required to taste a mixture of blood droplets and the boss’s spit to confirm that, yes, it was clearly coagulated blood on the site), before announcing his newest conclusion and pulling a body from a bog.

Clashing Agendas

The local leaders are bent on demonstrating that the maid was killed by an animal, perhaps to protect the calm, perhaps to shield one of their own. The pastor is intent on proving the opposite, and the proof so quickly accumulates in his favour that once more the drama’s plausibility and audience tolerance are tested. At its best, the series evokes memories of the adaptation a few years ago of the author’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the opposing allures and terrors presented by rational thought and belief. At its worst, it resembles Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Still, it appears to provide the answer to that debated question: “Females, choose the animal.”

• The series streams on Disney+ now.