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An heated debate lately went viral across online platforms, after someone asked the question for females: which would you prefer find yourself stranded in the woods with a man or a bear? Similar to the most engaging hypothetical scenarios, it exposed wildly different worldviews and experiences, illuminated divides among genders, and could easily cause an existential crisis for anyone pondering about it extensively. There was also the predictable follow-up in which some males took to the internet to tell women how stupid they had been for choosing the bear and went on to describe the punishments they deserved for it. This at minimum enabled those females who were uncertain over their choice to make it with a new confidence.

Portraying the Scenario

To Cook a Bear skillfully dramatises this clever small premise. The six-part series is based from Scandinavian writer Mikael Niemi’s 2018 novel with the identical title (translated two years later for English readers). It follows the tribulations of a clergyman (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his household as they come to start a fresh religious post within Kengis, an isolated village in northern Sweden, in 1852. In a place with few pleasures, not one of the locals especially appreciate his strict approach to drinking and dancing, but it is his defense of the poor – especially the indigenous Sami, from which hails the preacher’s adopted son Jussi (the young actor) – and his belief in social justice and equal rights that places him on a collision course against the Kengis local authorities.

The Antagonists

Quickly in cahoots opposing him are the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the fearsome mill owner the matron Sjödahl (Pernilla August), observed initially firing a recently mangled laborer with a month’s pay as he remains babbling at the sight of his pulped hand, and anyone else who benefit from a community who can be bought with some containers of the whisky provided by the unsettling shopkeeper the merchant Lindmark (the actor). However, in fairness, Lindmark’s creepiness diminishes once itinerant painter the artist Beronius arrives in the story (the performer, delivering an acting turn of exceptional discomfiting power). If they are – similar to the clergyman – only a little more being stereotypes, they are at least effective ones.

Narrative Development

With the seeds of conflict planted, it is time to proceed to narrative business. The maid employed by the doctor, Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), duly goes missing from the woods. Indications of her escape and bear markings upon a trunk are found but she is nowhere to be seen. Rumours and anxieties of a man/maid-eating beast roaming the woodland spread, but the pastor holds a different view that he and Jussi set out to verify.

A Strange Creation

To Cook a Bear is a somewhat odd beast. It conjures a strong impression of the desolation that lets distrust and prejudice and grim legends thrive from the native legend that bears might be dominated or inhabited by the spirits of men. And it doesn’t idealising the tough existence experienced by the residents, in which violence, whether that of the wild or mankind, always looms at the periphery, poised to explode. But the characters seldom evolve more than ciphers – or maybe, while the conflicts between justice and vengeance, logic and religion, good and evil escalate, representative characters within a moral tale – preventing the entire production truly coming to life.

Stylistic Shifts

And then, there are the many tonally jarring moments in which the pastor’s ability in finding evidence and discern the maid’s destiny becomes nearly laughable. He positions himself 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 rather hapless Hastings-cum-Watson (none of whom had to lick a blend of blood spatter and the boss’s spit to agree that, yes, it was definitely coagulated blood at the crime scene), before announcing his newest conclusion and pulling a corpse from a bog.

Clashing Agendas

The local leaders are determined proving that the maid was killed by a bear, maybe to preserve the calm, or possibly to protect one of their own. The clergyman is bent on establishing the opposite, and the proof so rapidly stacks up supporting his view that once more the show’s credibility and the viewer’s patience are tested. In its finest moments, To Cook a Bear evokes memories of the adaptation some years back of the author’s the serpent tale, through its portrayal of the competing allures and terrors offered by science and belief. At its worst, it’s more like Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Nevertheless, it does seem to offer the response to the earlier query: “Females, choose the animal.”

• The series is on Disney+ currently.