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An heated debate recently spread widely on social media, after a user asked the question to women: which would you prefer be lost in a forest with a man or with a bear? Like all the most engaging thought experiments, it exposed vastly opposing worldviews and experiences, highlighted divides among genders, and was likely cause an existential crisis for anyone pondering about it for too long. Additionally, there came the almost inevitable follow-up in which some males came online to inform women how stupid they had been to select the bear and went on to limn the consequences they deserved for it. This at minimum enabled those females who had been hesitating over their choice to make it with renewed assurance.

Portraying the Setup

To Cook a Bear skillfully dramatises this clever little setup. The six-part drama is based from Scandinavian writer Mikael Niemi’s 2018 book of the same name (rendered in 2020 for an English audience). It follows the struggles of a pastor (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his household as they come to start a fresh religious post within Kengis, a remote village in Sweden’s north, in 1852. In a place lacking many joys, not one of the locals especially warm to his strict stance on alcohol and dancing, but it is his defense of the poor – particularly the indigenous Sami, from which comes the pastor’s foster child Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in social justice and equality that places him on a collision course against the Kengis local authorities.

The Antagonists

Quickly collaborating opposing him include the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the fearsome mill owner Madam Sjödahl (Pernilla August), seen initially firing a newly injured laborer with minimal compensation as he remains babbling at the sight of his pulped hand, and all others who profit from a community who can be bought for a few bottles of the whisky sold by the creepy shopkeeper Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). Although, to be fair, Lindmark’s creepiness diminishes when travelling artist the artist Beronius arrives on the scene (the performer, providing an acting turn of rare unsettling intensity). If they are – like the pastor himself – only a little more than caricatures, they still serve as potent archetypes.

Narrative Development

Once the foundations of conflict sown, the moment arrives to proceed to narrative business. The maid employed by the doctor, the character Hilda (the actress), duly goes missing from the woods. Indications of her flight and animal scratches upon a trunk are found yet she remains nowhere to be seen. Rumours and anxieties regarding a human-devouring beast roaming the woodland circulate, but the pastor holds a different view that he and Jussi embark to prove.

An Odd Beast

To Cook a Bear is a somewhat odd beast. It creates a strong impression of the desolation that allows suspicion and prejudice and grim legends thrive from the native legend that animals might be dominated or possessed by the spirits of men. It avoids romanticise the hardscrabble life led by the residents, where violence, whether that of the wild or mankind, lurks constantly on the edges, poised to explode. Yet the personas seldom evolve beyond symbols – or maybe, as the struggles between justice and revenge, rationality and religion, good and wickedness intensify, representative characters in a fable – which stops the whole thing truly coming to life.

Tonal Inconsistencies

And then, there are numerous tonally jarring moments in which the clergyman’s skill to discover clues and determine the maid’s destiny turns almost risible. He stands observing shattered containers and clumps of hair in hay barns as a fusion of the Belgian detective and Sherlock Holmes – alongside Jussi a particularly unfortunate Hastings-cum-Watson (none of whom had to lick a mixture of blood droplets and the boss’s spit to confirm that, yes, it was clearly coagulated blood at the crime scene), before announcing his newest conclusion and extracting a corpse from a bog.

Opposing Goals

The village elite are bent on demonstrating that Hilda met her end by a bear, maybe to preserve the calm, or possibly to protect a fellow elite. The clergyman is intent on proving the opposite, and the proof so rapidly stacks up supporting his view that once more the show’s credibility and the viewer’s patience get strained. In its finest moments, To Cook a Bear is reminiscent of the adaptation some years back of Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, through its portrayal of the competing attractions and terrors offered by science and religion. At its worst, it’s more like Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Still, it appears to provide the answer to the earlier query: “Females, choose the animal.”

• To Cook a Bear streams on Disney+ now.