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A heated debate recently went viral on social media, following someone asked a query to women: which would you prefer be lost in the woods with a man or a bear? Similar to the best thought experiments, it revealed vastly opposing perspectives and life encounters, highlighted chasms among genders, and could easily cause an existential crisis for anyone pondering on it extensively. There was also the almost inevitable coda where men of a certain stripe took to the internet to inform women how stupid they were to select the animal and proceeded to limn the consequences they merited for that choice. This at minimum enabled those females who were uncertain over their choice to make it with a new confidence.

Dramatising the Scenario

To Cook a Bear effectively brings to life this clever little setup. The six-part drama is adapted from Scandinavian writer Mikael Niemi’s 2018 book of the same name (rendered in 2020 for an English audience). It traces the struggles of a pastor (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his family when they arrive to start a fresh religious post in Kengis, a remote village in northern Sweden, in 1852. Within a community with few pleasures, not one of the locals especially appreciate his strict approach to drinking and dancing, but it is his protection of impoverished people – especially the native Sami population, from among whom comes the preacher’s foster child Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in societal fairness and equality that sets him in direct opposition with the Kengis local authorities.

The Opposing Forces

Quickly in cahoots against him include the sheriff the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the intimidating mill owner the matron Sjödahl (the actress), observed early on firing a recently mangled worker with a month’s pay as he remains gibbering at the sight his crushed hand, and all others who profit from a community who can be bought with some containers of the whisky provided by the unsettling store owner the merchant Lindmark (the actor). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s creepiness pales once travelling artist Beronius appears in the story (the performer, providing an acting turn of exceptional unsettling intensity). If they are – like the pastor himself – only a little more than caricatures, they are at least effective ones.

Narrative Development

Once the foundations of tension sown, the moment arrives to proceed to narrative business. The maid employed by the doctor, the character Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), accordingly vanishes in the forest. Signs of her escape and bear markings on a tree get discovered but she is nowhere to be seen. Rumours and fears regarding a human-devouring bear roaming the woods 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 odd beast. It creates a strong impression of the desolation that allows suspicion and bias and dark myths thrive from the native legend that bears can be controlled or inhabited by the souls of men. And it doesn’t idealising the hardscrabble life led by the villagers, where brutality, be it from the wild or people, always looms at the periphery, waiting to erupt. Yet the personas rarely become more than ciphers – or maybe, as the struggles amid fairness and vengeance, rationality and religion, good 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 in which the clergyman’s skill to discover clues and discern Hilda’s fate turns nearly laughable. He stands observing broken milk pots and strands of fur in hay barns as a fusion of the Belgian detective the English sleuth – alongside Jussi a particularly unfortunate Hastings-cum-Watson (neither of whom were required to lick a blend of blood spatter and the boss’s spit to agree that indeed, it was definitely dried blood at the crime scene), before announcing his newest conclusion and pulling a body out of a swamp.

Opposing Goals

The village elite are bent on demonstrating that the maid met her end by an animal, perhaps to preserve the calm, perhaps to shield one of their own. The pastor is bent on establishing the opposite, and the evidence so rapidly stacks up in his favour that again the drama’s plausibility and audience tolerance get strained. In its finest moments, To Cook a Bear evokes memories of the TV version some years back of Sarah Perry’s the serpent tale, through its portrayal of the competing allures and fears offered by science and belief. At its worst, it’s more like 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+ now.