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An intense debate lately went viral across online platforms, after someone posed a query to women: would you rather be lost in a forest alongside a male or a bear? Like all the best thought experiments, it exposed vastly opposing perspectives and experiences, highlighted chasms among genders, and was likely to induce a deep personal dilemma if you thought about it for too long. Additionally, there came the predictable follow-up in which men of a certain stripe came online to tell women how foolish they were to select the animal and proceeded to describe the punishments they deserved for that choice. This at minimum enabled the women who were uncertain over their choice to make it with a new confidence.

Portraying the Setup

To Cook a Bear skillfully brings to life this clever little setup. The six-part drama is based on Scandinavian writer the novelist’s 2018 book of the same name (translated in 2020 for an English audience). It traces the tribulations of a pastor (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his family as they come to start a new ministry in Kengis, an isolated village in Sweden’s north, in 1852. In a place lacking many joys, not one of the locals especially warm to his puritanical approach to alcohol and revelry, yet it is his protection of impoverished people – particularly the native Sami population, from which comes the pastor’s adopted son Jussi (the young actor) – and his conviction in social justice and equal rights that places him on a collision course against the Kengis powers that be.

The Antagonists

Quickly in cahoots opposing him are the lawman Brahe (the performer), the intimidating factory proprietor Madam Sjödahl (Pernilla August), observed initially firing a newly injured worker with a month’s pay as he remains gibbering upon seeing of his pulped hand, and all others who profit from a populace who can be bought for a few bottles of liquor sold by the unsettling store owner the merchant Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). Although, to be fair, Lindmark’s eeriness pales when travelling artist the artist Beronius appears in the story (Simon J Berger, delivering an acting turn of exceptional 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 conflict sown, it is time to proceed to narrative business. The maid employed by the doctor, Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), accordingly goes missing from the woods. Indications of her escape and bear markings on a tree are found yet she remains nowhere to be seen. Rumours and anxieties of a man/maid-eating bear prowling the woods circulate, yet the clergyman has another theory which he and his ward 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 lets suspicion and prejudice and grim legends thrive based on local folklore that bears might be dominated or inhabited by the souls of men. It avoids idealising the tough existence experienced by the villagers, where violence, whether that of nature or people, always looms at the periphery, poised to explode. But the characters seldom evolve beyond symbols – or perhaps, as the struggles amid fairness and revenge, logic and religion, good and evil intensify, emblematic figures within a moral tale – which stops the entire production truly coming to life.

Tonal Inconsistencies

Additionally, there are numerous stylistically clashing moments where the pastor’s ability in finding evidence and discern Hilda’s fate turns nearly laughable. He stands observing shattered containers and strands of fur within storage sheds as a fusion of the Belgian detective and Sherlock Holmes – alongside Jussi a particularly unfortunate Hastings-cum-Watson (neither of whom were required to taste a mixture of blood droplets and saliva from his superior to agree that, yes, it was clearly coagulated blood at the crime scene), prior to declaring his latest deduction and extracting a body out of a swamp.

Clashing Agendas

The local leaders are determined proving that Hilda was killed by a bear, maybe to protect the calm, or possibly to protect a fellow elite. The pastor is bent on proving the opposite, and the evidence so rapidly stacks up in his favour that once more the show’s credibility and the viewer’s patience get strained. At its best, the series is reminiscent of the adaptation some years back of Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, through its portrayal of the opposing attractions and terrors presented by science and religion. In its low points, it resembles a bear-themed police procedural. Still, it appears to provide the answer to the earlier query: “Ladies, take the bear.”

• The series streams on Disney+ now.