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An heated debate lately spread widely across online platforms, after a user asked the question for females: would you rather find yourself stranded in a forest with a man or a bear? Like all the most engaging thought experiments, it revealed wildly different perspectives and life encounters, illuminated divides among genders, and was likely cause an existential crisis for anyone pondering on it extensively. Additionally, there came the predictable coda where men of a certain stripe took to the internet to tell women how stupid they had been for choosing the animal and proceeded to limn the consequences they merited for that choice. This at least enabled those females who had been hesitating about their decision to make it with renewed assurance.

Dramatising the Scenario

To Cook a Bear effectively brings to life this nifty small premise. This six-episode drama is adapted on Swedish author Mikael Niemi’s 2018 book of the same name (translated two years later for English readers). It follows the tribulations of a clergyman (the lead actor) and his family when they arrive to begin a fresh religious post in Kengis, a remote settlement in northern Sweden, in 1852. In a place with few pleasures, none of the locals especially warm to his puritanical approach to alcohol and dancing, but it is his protection of impoverished people – especially the indigenous Sami, from among whom hails the pastor’s adopted son Jussi (the young actor) – and his belief in societal fairness and equal rights that sets him in direct opposition against the Kengis local authorities.

The Opposing Forces

Quickly collaborating against him include the lawman the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the intimidating factory proprietor Madam Sjödahl (the actress), observed initially firing a recently mangled worker with minimal compensation as he remains gibbering upon seeing of his pulped hand, and all others who benefit from a community easily swayed for a few bottles of liquor sold by the unsettling store owner the merchant Lindmark (the actor). Although, in fairness, Lindmark’s eeriness diminishes when travelling artist the artist Beronius appears on the scene (Simon J Berger, providing an acting turn of rare unsettling intensity). While they remain – like the pastor himself – only a little more being stereotypes, they still serve as effective ones.

Narrative Development

Once the foundations of conflict planted, it is time to proceed with the storyline. The servant employed by the doctor, Hilda (the actress), duly vanishes from the woods. Indications of her escape and bear markings on a tree are found but she is nowhere to be seen. Gossip and fears of a man/maid-eating beast prowling the woodland circulate, yet the clergyman has another theory which he and his ward set out to prove.

A Strange Creation

This Bear Drama is a slightly odd beast. It creates a strong impression of the desolation that lets suspicion and bias and dark myths thrive from the native legend that bears might be dominated or possessed by the souls of men. And it doesn’t romanticise the tough existence experienced by the villagers, where violence, be it from the wild or people, always looms at the periphery, waiting to erupt. But the characters seldom evolve more than ciphers – or perhaps, while the conflicts between justice and vengeance, rationality and religion, virtue and evil escalate, emblematic figures in a fable – preventing the entire production fully coming to life.

Stylistic Shifts

Additionally, exist the many stylistically clashing moments in which the pastor’s ability in finding evidence and determine Hilda’s fate turns almost risible. He stands observing broken milk pots and strands of fur within storage sheds like a combined the Belgian detective the English sleuth – alongside Jussi a rather hapless Hastings-cum-Watson (none of whom were required to lick a mixture of blood spatter and saliva from his superior to confirm that indeed, it was clearly dried blood at the crime scene), before announcing his latest deduction and pulling a body out of a swamp.

Opposing Goals

The local leaders are determined proving that Hilda met her end by an animal, maybe to preserve the calm, or possibly to shield one of their own. The clergyman is intent on establishing the opposite, and the proof so rapidly stacks up in his favour that again the drama’s plausibility and the viewer’s patience get strained. In its finest moments, To Cook a Bear evokes memories of the TV version a few years ago of Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the competing attractions and terrors offered by science and belief. At its worst, it’s more like a bear-themed police procedural. Nevertheless, it appears to provide the answer to the earlier query: “Ladies, take the bear.”

• The series streams on Disney+ currently.