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An intense discussion recently went viral on social media, following someone asked the question for females: which would you prefer find yourself stranded in the woods alongside a male or with a bear? Like all the best thought experiments, it exposed wildly different perspectives and life encounters, highlighted divides between the sexes, and could easily to induce a deep personal dilemma for anyone pondering about it for too long. Additionally, there came the predictable coda in which men of a certain stripe took to the internet to tell females how foolish they were for choosing the animal and went on to limn the consequences they merited for it. This at minimum enabled those females who had been hesitating about their decision to decide with a new confidence.

Portraying the Setup

To Cook a Bear skillfully brings to life this clever little setup. This six-episode drama is based from Swedish author Mikael Niemi’s 2018 novel of the same name (translated two years later for English readers). It follows the tribulations of a pastor (the lead actor) and his household as they come to start a new ministry in Kengis, a remote settlement in Sweden’s north, during the mid-19th century. Within a community with few pleasures, not one of the locals especially appreciate his strict stance on drinking and dancing, but it is his defense of impoverished people – particularly the native Sami population, from among whom comes the preacher’s foster child Jussi (the young actor) – and his conviction in societal fairness and equality that places him in direct opposition with the Kengis powers that be.

The Antagonists

Soon in cahoots opposing him include the lawman Brahe (the performer), the intimidating factory proprietor the matron Sjödahl (Pernilla August), observed initially firing a recently mangled laborer with minimal compensation while he is still babbling at the sight his crushed hand, and all others who benefit from a populace easily swayed for a few bottles of liquor sold by the unsettling shopkeeper the merchant Lindmark (the actor). Although, in fairness, Lindmark’s eeriness pales when travelling artist Beronius appears on the scene (the performer, providing a performance of rare unsettling intensity). While they remain – similar to the clergyman – only a little more than caricatures, they are at least effective ones.

Narrative Development

Once the foundations of tension sown, the moment arrives to get down with the storyline. The maid from the doctor’s house, the character Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), accordingly goes missing in the forest. Indications of her escape and animal scratches upon a trunk are found yet she remains nowhere to be seen. Gossip and anxieties of a man/maid-eating bear prowling the woodland spread, yet the clergyman has another theory which he and his ward embark to prove.

A Strange Creation

This Bear Drama is a slightly odd beast. It creates a fine sense of the desolation that allows distrust and prejudice and grim legends flourish from the native legend that bears can be controlled or possessed by the souls of humans. It avoids idealising the tough existence led by the residents, in which brutality, be it from the wild or people, lurks constantly on the edges, waiting to erupt. Yet the personas rarely become more than ciphers – or perhaps, as the struggles amid fairness and vengeance, rationality and faith, virtue and evil escalate, emblematic figures in a fable – which stops the entire production fully coming to life.

Tonal Inconsistencies

Additionally, exist the many tonally jarring moments in which the clergyman’s skill to discover clues and determine the maid’s destiny becomes nearly laughable. He positions himself observing broken milk pots and clumps of hair in hay barns like a combined the Belgian detective and Sherlock Holmes – with Jussi a rather hapless Hastings-cum-Watson (none of whom had to taste a mixture of blood spatter and saliva from his superior to confirm that, yes, it was clearly coagulated blood on the site), before announcing his newest conclusion and pulling a corpse from a bog.

Opposing Goals

The village elite are determined demonstrating that Hilda was killed by a bear, perhaps to protect the calm, or possibly to shield one of their own. The pastor is intent on proving otherwise, and the proof so rapidly accumulates in his favour that once more the show’s credibility and audience tolerance are tested. In its finest moments, the series evokes memories of the adaptation some years back of the author’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 does seem to offer the answer to that debated question: “Ladies, take the bear.”

• To Cook a Bear streams on Disney+ now.