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A intense discussion recently spread widely on social media, after a user asked the question for females: which would you prefer find yourself stranded in a forest alongside a male or with a bear? Like all the most engaging thought experiments, it revealed vastly opposing worldviews and life encounters, highlighted divides between the sexes, and could easily to induce an existential crisis for anyone pondering on it for too long. Additionally, there came the predictable coda where men of a certain stripe took to the internet to inform women how stupid they were to select the bear and went on to limn the consequences they deserved for that choice. This at least allowed the women who had been hesitating about their decision to decide with a new confidence.

Dramatising the Setup

To Cook a Bear effectively dramatises this nifty little setup. This six-episode series is based from Scandinavian writer the novelist’s 2018 book with the identical title (rendered in 2020 for an English audience). It follows the tribulations of a pastor (the lead actor) and his family when they arrive to begin a new ministry in Kengis, an isolated village in northern Sweden, in 1852. Within a community lacking many joys, none of the locals especially warm to his puritanical approach to alcohol and dancing, yet it is his protection of the poor – particularly the native Sami population, from which hails the preacher’s adopted son the youth Jussi (the young actor) – and his belief in social justice and equality that places him in direct opposition against the Kengis local authorities.

The Opposing Forces

Soon in cahoots opposing him include the lawman Brahe (the performer), the intimidating mill owner Madam Sjödahl (the actress), observed initially dismissing a newly injured laborer with a month’s pay while he is still babbling upon seeing his crushed hand, and all others who profit from a populace easily swayed for a few bottles of liquor provided by the unsettling shopkeeper Lindmark (the actor). Although, to be fair, Lindmark’s eeriness pales when itinerant painter the artist Beronius appears in the story (Simon J Berger, providing a performance of rare discomfiting power). If they are – similar to the clergyman – only a little more than caricatures, they are at least potent archetypes.

Plot Progression

Once the foundations of tension sown, the moment arrives to get down with the storyline. The servant employed by the doctor, the character Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), accordingly goes missing in the forest. Indications of her escape and bear markings on a tree are found but she is completely absent. Gossip and anxieties regarding a human-devouring bear roaming the woods spread, yet the clergyman has another theory that he and Jussi embark to verify.

An Odd Beast

This Bear Drama is a slightly odd beast. It conjures a strong impression of the desolation that allows suspicion and bias and grim legends thrive from the native legend that animals might be dominated or possessed by the souls of humans. It avoids romanticise the hardscrabble life led by the residents, in which brutality, whether that of the wild or mankind, always looms on the edges, poised to explode. Yet the personas seldom evolve beyond symbols – or maybe, as the struggles amid fairness and revenge, rationality and religion, virtue and evil escalate, representative characters in a fable – which stops the entire production truly coming to life.

Stylistic Shifts

And then, exist the many tonally jarring instances where the pastor’s ability to discover clues and determine the maid’s destiny turns almost risible. He stands looking at broken milk pots and strands of fur within storage sheds as a fusion of Hercule Poirot the English sleuth – alongside Jussi a rather hapless Hastings-cum-Watson (neither of whom were required to lick a mixture of blood droplets and the boss’s spit to agree that indeed, it was clearly dried blood on the site), prior to declaring his newest conclusion and extracting a body from a bog.

Opposing Goals

The village elite are determined demonstrating that Hilda met her end by an animal, perhaps to protect the calm, or possibly to shield a fellow elite. The clergyman is intent on establishing otherwise, and the evidence so quickly accumulates supporting his view that again the show’s credibility and audience tolerance get strained. In its finest moments, the series evokes memories of the TV version a few years ago of Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the opposing allures and terrors offered by science and religion. In its low points, it resembles Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Nevertheless, it appears to offer the response to the earlier query: “Females, choose the animal.”

• The series is on Disney+ now.