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A heated discussion lately went viral on social media, after a user asked a query for females: would you rather find yourself stranded in the woods with a man or with a bear? Like all the best hypothetical scenarios, it revealed wildly different worldviews and experiences, highlighted chasms between the sexes, and could easily cause a deep personal dilemma for anyone pondering on it for too long. There was also the predictable follow-up in which men of a certain stripe took to the internet to inform women how foolish they had been to select the animal and proceeded to describe the consequences they merited for it. This at least enabled those females who were uncertain about their decision to make it with renewed assurance.

Dramatising the Setup

To Cook a Bear skillfully dramatises this nifty little setup. This six-episode series is based from Scandinavian writer the novelist’s 2018 book with the identical title (translated two years later for English readers). It traces the struggles of a pastor (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his household as they come to begin a new ministry in Kengis, an isolated village in northern Sweden, in 1852. Within a community with few pleasures, not one of the inhabitants particularly warm to his strict approach to alcohol and dancing, yet it is his protection of the poor – particularly the indigenous Sami, from which hails the preacher’s foster child Jussi (the young actor) – and his belief in societal fairness and equal rights that places him on a collision course with the Kengis powers that be.

The Opposing Forces

Quickly in cahoots against him include the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the intimidating mill owner Madam Sjödahl (Pernilla August), observed initially dismissing a recently mangled worker with a month’s pay as he remains 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 creepy shopkeeper Lindmark (the actor). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s eeriness pales once travelling artist the artist Beronius arrives in the story (Simon J Berger, providing an acting turn of rare unsettling intensity). While they remain – similar to the clergyman – only a little more than caricatures, they still serve as effective ones.

Plot Progression

Once the foundations of conflict sown, the moment arrives to proceed with the storyline. The maid employed by the doctor, Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), accordingly vanishes from the woods. Signs of her flight and animal scratches on a tree get discovered yet she remains completely absent. Rumours and anxieties regarding a human-devouring beast prowling the woodland circulate, yet the clergyman holds a different view that he and Jussi set out to prove.

An Odd Beast

To Cook a Bear is a somewhat odd beast. It conjures a fine sense of the bleakness that lets suspicion and bias and dark myths thrive based on local folklore that bears might be dominated or inhabited by the souls of men. And it doesn’t idealising the hardscrabble life led by the villagers, where brutality, whether that of nature or mankind, always looms on the edges, poised to explode. But the characters rarely become more than ciphers – or perhaps, as the struggles between justice and vengeance, rationality and faith, virtue and evil escalate, representative characters in a fable – which stops the whole thing fully becoming immersive.

Tonal Inconsistencies

And then, there are the many stylistically clashing instances in which the pastor’s ability in finding evidence and discern Hilda’s fate turns nearly laughable. He stands looking at broken milk pots and clumps of hair in hay barns as a fusion of the Belgian detective and Sherlock Holmes – with Jussi a particularly unfortunate assistant figure (none of whom had to taste a blend of blood spatter and the boss’s spit to agree that, yes, it was definitely coagulated blood on the site), prior to declaring his newest conclusion and pulling a corpse from a bog.

Opposing Goals

The village elite are bent on proving that the maid was killed by an animal, perhaps to preserve the peace, perhaps to shield a fellow elite. The clergyman is intent on establishing the opposite, and the evidence so rapidly stacks up in his favour that once more the drama’s plausibility and audience tolerance get strained. At its best, the series evokes memories of the TV version a few years ago of the author’s the serpent tale, with its evocation of the opposing allures and terrors presented by science and religion. At its worst, it resembles a bear-themed police procedural. Still, it does seem to offer the answer to the earlier query: “Females, choose the animal.”

• The series is on Disney+ now.