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An heated discussion lately spread widely across online platforms, after someone asked a query for females: which would you prefer be lost in the woods with a man or with a bear? Like all the best hypothetical scenarios, it revealed wildly different worldviews and experiences, illuminated divides among genders, and was likely to induce a deep personal dilemma if you thought on it extensively. Additionally, there came the predictable coda in which men of a certain stripe took to the internet to inform females how foolish they were to select the animal and proceeded to describe the punishments they deserved for that choice. This at minimum enabled the women who were uncertain over their choice to decide with a new confidence.

Dramatising the Scenario

To Cook a Bear skillfully brings to life this clever little setup. The six-part series is adapted from Swedish author the novelist’s 2018 novel of the same name (translated two years later for English readers). It follows the struggles of a pastor (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his family as they come to start a fresh religious post in Kengis, an isolated settlement in Sweden’s north, in 1852. Within a community lacking many joys, not one of the inhabitants especially warm to his puritanical approach to alcohol and dancing, yet it is his defense of impoverished people – particularly the native Sami population, from which hails the preacher’s foster child Jussi (the young actor) – and his conviction in societal fairness and equal rights that places him on a collision course against the Kengis local authorities.

The Antagonists

Quickly collaborating opposing him are the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the fearsome mill owner Madam Sjödahl (the actress), seen initially dismissing a recently mangled laborer with minimal compensation as he remains babbling at the sight of his pulped hand, and anyone else who profit from a community who can be bought for a few bottles of the whisky sold by the unsettling shopkeeper the merchant Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s creepiness diminishes when travelling artist Beronius arrives on the scene (Simon J Berger, delivering 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 tension sown, it is time to get down 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 bear markings on a tree get discovered but she is nowhere to be seen. Gossip and anxieties of a man/maid-eating bear roaming the woods spread, but the pastor holds a different view which he and his ward set out to verify.

A Strange Creation

To Cook a Bear is a slightly peculiar show. It creates a fine sense of the desolation that lets suspicion and prejudice and dark myths thrive based on local folklore that animals can be controlled or inhabited by the spirits of humans. It avoids romanticise the tough existence experienced by the residents, where violence, whether that of nature or mankind, always looms at the periphery, poised to explode. But the characters seldom evolve beyond symbols – or perhaps, while the conflicts amid fairness and revenge, logic and religion, virtue and evil escalate, representative characters within a moral tale – preventing the entire production fully becoming immersive.

Tonal Inconsistencies

And then, exist numerous tonally jarring moments where the clergyman’s skill to discover clues and determine Hilda’s fate turns nearly laughable. He positions himself observing shattered containers and strands of fur within storage sheds like a combined the Belgian detective the English sleuth – with Jussi a rather hapless Hastings-cum-Watson (neither of whom had to lick a mixture of blood spatter and the boss’s spit to confirm that, yes, it was clearly dried blood at the crime scene), before announcing his latest deduction and extracting a corpse out of a swamp.

Opposing Goals

The local leaders are determined demonstrating that Hilda was killed by a bear, perhaps to preserve the calm, or possibly to protect one of their own. The pastor is intent on proving otherwise, and the proof so rapidly stacks up in his favour that again the drama’s plausibility and audience tolerance get strained. At its best, To Cook a Bear is reminiscent of the adaptation some years back of Sarah Perry’s the serpent tale, through its portrayal of the opposing allures and fears presented by science and belief. In its low points, it’s more like a bear-themed police procedural. Nevertheless, it appears to provide the response to the earlier query: “Ladies, take the bear.”

• To Cook a Bear is on Disney+ now.