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A heated debate recently spread widely on social media, after a user asked a query to women: would you rather be lost in a forest with a man or a bear? Like all the most engaging thought experiments, it revealed wildly different perspectives and life encounters, illuminated chasms among genders, and could easily to induce an existential crisis if you thought about it for too long. Additionally, there came the predictable follow-up in which some males came online to inform women how stupid they had been to select the animal and proceeded to limn the punishments they merited for that choice. This at least enabled the women who were uncertain over their choice to decide with renewed assurance.

Portraying the Setup

To Cook a Bear effectively brings to life this nifty small premise. This six-episode drama is adapted on Scandinavian writer Mikael Niemi’s 2018 novel with the identical title (translated two years later for English readers). It traces the tribulations of a pastor (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his household when they arrive to start a fresh religious post in Kengis, an isolated settlement in Sweden’s north, in 1852. Within a community with few pleasures, not one of the locals especially appreciate his strict stance on drinking and revelry, but it is his protection of impoverished people – particularly the native Sami population, from among whom hails the pastor’s foster child the youth Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his conviction in societal fairness and equality that places him on a collision course with the Kengis powers that be.

The Antagonists

Quickly in cahoots against him include the sheriff the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the intimidating mill owner the matron Sjödahl (the actress), seen early on dismissing a recently mangled laborer with minimal compensation while he is still gibbering upon seeing of his pulped hand, and all others who profit from a community easily swayed for a few bottles of the whisky provided by the unsettling store owner the merchant Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). However, in fairness, Lindmark’s creepiness diminishes once itinerant painter Beronius appears in the story (Simon J Berger, providing an acting turn of rare unsettling intensity). If they are – like the pastor himself – just slightly beyond than caricatures, they still serve as potent archetypes.

Plot Progression

Once the foundations of tension planted, the moment arrives to get down to narrative business. The maid from the doctor’s house, Hilda (the actress), duly goes missing in the forest. Indications of her flight and bear markings upon a trunk get discovered but she is nowhere to be seen. Gossip and anxieties of a man/maid-eating bear roaming the woods circulate, but the pastor has another theory which he and his ward set out to verify.

A Strange Creation

This Bear Drama is a somewhat peculiar show. It conjures a fine sense of the desolation that lets distrust and bias and grim legends thrive based on local folklore that animals can be controlled or inhabited by the spirits of men. It avoids idealising the tough existence experienced by the villagers, in which violence, whether that of nature or mankind, always looms on the edges, poised to explode. Yet the personas rarely become beyond symbols – or maybe, as the struggles between justice and revenge, logic and religion, virtue and evil escalate, emblematic figures within a moral tale – which stops the whole thing truly becoming immersive.

Tonal Inconsistencies

Additionally, exist numerous tonally jarring moments in which the pastor’s ability in finding evidence and determine Hilda’s fate turns nearly laughable. He positions himself looking at shattered containers and clumps of hair within storage sheds like a combined the Belgian detective and Sherlock Holmes – with Jussi a rather hapless Hastings-cum-Watson (none of whom had to lick a mixture of blood spatter 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 extracting a body from a bog.

Clashing Agendas

The village elite are determined proving that Hilda met her end by a bear, maybe to preserve the peace, perhaps to protect a fellow elite. The clergyman is bent on proving the opposite, and the proof so quickly stacks up in his favour that again the show’s credibility and the viewer’s patience are tested. In its finest moments, the series evokes memories of the adaptation some years back of the author’s The Essex Serpent, through its portrayal of the opposing allures and fears offered by science and religion. At its worst, it’s more like a bear-themed police procedural. Still, it does seem to provide the answer to that debated question: “Ladies, take the bear.”

• The series streams on Disney+ currently.