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A intense discussion lately went viral across online platforms, after a user asked a query for females: would you rather be lost in a forest with a man or a bear? Like all the most engaging hypothetical scenarios, it revealed wildly different worldviews and experiences, highlighted chasms among genders, and was likely cause a deep personal dilemma for anyone pondering on it for too long. There was also the almost inevitable coda in which men of a certain stripe came online to tell females how foolish they had been to select the bear and proceeded to limn the punishments they deserved for it. This at minimum enabled the women who were uncertain about their decision to decide with renewed assurance.

Dramatising the Scenario

To Cook a Bear skillfully dramatises this nifty little setup. The six-part drama is adapted from Scandinavian writer the novelist’s 2018 novel with the identical title (translated two years later for an English audience). It traces the tribulations of a pastor (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his household when they arrive to start a fresh religious post within Kengis, a remote village in northern Sweden, in 1852. Within a community with few pleasures, not one of the inhabitants particularly warm to his puritanical stance on drinking and dancing, but it is his protection of impoverished people – particularly the native Sami population, from among whom comes 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 against the Kengis local authorities.

The Antagonists

Quickly in cahoots against him are the lawman Brahe (the performer), the fearsome mill owner the matron Sjödahl (the actress), seen early on dismissing a recently mangled worker with a month’s pay as he remains babbling upon seeing his crushed hand, and all others who profit from a community easily swayed with some containers of the whisky provided by the creepy store owner the merchant Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). Although, to be fair, Lindmark’s creepiness diminishes once travelling artist the artist Beronius appears in the story (Simon J Berger, providing an acting turn of rare discomfiting power). While they remain – like the pastor himself – only a little more than caricatures, they still serve as effective ones.

Plot Progression

With the seeds of tension planted, it is time to proceed with the storyline. The maid employed by the doctor, the character Hilda (the actress), accordingly goes missing in the forest. Signs of her flight and bear markings upon a trunk get discovered yet she remains nowhere to be seen. Rumours and fears of a man/maid-eating beast prowling the woodland circulate, yet the clergyman has another theory that he and Jussi set out to prove.

An Odd Beast

To Cook a Bear is a slightly peculiar show. It creates a strong impression of the desolation that lets distrust and prejudice and dark myths flourish from the native legend that bears might be dominated or inhabited by the spirits of humans. And it doesn’t romanticise the tough existence led by the villagers, where violence, be it from nature or mankind, lurks constantly at the periphery, waiting to erupt. Yet the personas seldom evolve more than ciphers – or maybe, while the conflicts between justice and revenge, rationality and religion, virtue and wickedness escalate, emblematic figures in a fable – preventing the whole thing truly becoming immersive.

Stylistic Shifts

Additionally, there are the many stylistically clashing instances where the pastor’s ability in finding evidence and determine Hilda’s fate becomes almost risible. He positions himself looking at shattered containers and strands of fur in hay barns as a fusion of Hercule Poirot the English sleuth – alongside Jussi a particularly unfortunate assistant figure (neither of whom were required to lick a mixture of blood droplets and the boss’s spit to confirm that, yes, it was definitely dried blood at the crime scene), prior to declaring his latest deduction and extracting a body out of a swamp.

Opposing Goals

The local leaders are bent on demonstrating that Hilda was killed by a bear, perhaps to preserve the peace, perhaps to shield one of their own. The pastor is intent on proving otherwise, and the proof so rapidly stacks up supporting his view that once more 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 competing attractions and fears offered by rational thought and religion. At its worst, it’s more like a bear-themed police procedural. Nevertheless, it does seem to offer the response to that debated question: “Females, choose the animal.”

• To Cook a Bear streams on Disney+ now.