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A heated discussion recently spread widely across online platforms, after someone posed the question to women: would you rather be lost in a forest alongside a male or a bear? Similar to the most engaging thought experiments, it exposed wildly different worldviews and life encounters, highlighted divides among genders, and could easily cause an existential crisis for anyone pondering on it extensively. Additionally, there came the almost inevitable follow-up in which some males came online to inform females how foolish they were for choosing the animal and went on to describe the punishments they merited for it. This at minimum allowed the women who were uncertain about their decision to make it with a new confidence.

Dramatising the Setup

To Cook a Bear effectively dramatises this clever small premise. This six-episode drama is adapted on Swedish author Mikael Niemi’s 2018 book with the identical title (rendered two years later for English readers). It follows the tribulations of a clergyman (the lead actor) and his household as they come to begin a fresh religious post in Kengis, an isolated village in northern Sweden, in 1852. In a place lacking many joys, none of the locals especially appreciate his puritanical stance on drinking and revelry, but it is his defense of impoverished people – especially the native Sami population, from among whom hails the preacher’s adopted son Jussi (the young actor) – and his conviction in societal fairness and equality that sets him in direct opposition with the Kengis powers that be.

The Opposing Forces

Quickly in cahoots against him are the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the fearsome mill owner the matron Sjödahl (the actress), seen initially dismissing a recently mangled laborer with a month’s pay as he remains gibbering upon seeing of his pulped hand, and anyone else who profit from a populace easily swayed for a few bottles of liquor sold by the unsettling store owner Lindmark (the actor). Although, to be fair, Lindmark’s eeriness pales when itinerant painter the artist Beronius appears on the scene (the performer, providing an acting turn of rare unsettling intensity). While they remain – like the pastor himself – just slightly beyond being stereotypes, they still serve as effective ones.

Narrative Development

With the seeds of conflict planted, the moment arrives to proceed to narrative business. The maid employed by the doctor, Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), duly vanishes in the forest. Indications of her escape and animal scratches on a tree get discovered yet she remains completely absent. Rumours and anxieties of a man/maid-eating bear prowling the woods spread, yet the clergyman has another theory which he and his ward set out to verify.

A Strange Creation

To Cook a Bear is a slightly odd beast. It creates a fine sense of the desolation that allows distrust and bias and grim legends flourish from the native legend that animals might be dominated or inhabited by the souls of men. And it doesn’t romanticise the hardscrabble life led by the residents, where brutality, be it from the wild or mankind, always looms at the periphery, poised to explode. Yet the personas rarely become more than ciphers – or perhaps, as the struggles between justice and vengeance, logic and faith, virtue and evil escalate, emblematic figures in a fable – preventing the whole thing truly coming to life.

Tonal Inconsistencies

Additionally, there are the many stylistically clashing moments where the pastor’s ability in finding evidence and determine Hilda’s fate turns nearly laughable. He stands looking at broken milk pots and clumps of hair within storage sheds like a combined the Belgian detective the English sleuth – with Jussi a rather hapless Hastings-cum-Watson (none of whom were required to taste a blend of blood spatter and the boss’s spit to confirm that indeed, it was definitely coagulated blood at the crime scene), prior to declaring his latest deduction and pulling a body from a bog.

Opposing Goals

The local leaders are bent on demonstrating that Hilda was killed by an animal, perhaps to preserve the peace, perhaps to shield one of their own. The clergyman is bent on proving the opposite, and the evidence so quickly accumulates supporting his view that again the show’s credibility and the viewer’s patience are tested. At its best, To Cook a Bear evokes memories of the adaptation some years back of the author’s The Essex Serpent, through its portrayal of the opposing allures and fears presented by science and religion. In its low points, it’s more like Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Nevertheless, it appears to offer the answer to the earlier query: “Females, choose the animal.”

• To Cook a Bear streams on Disney+ now.