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An intense discussion recently went viral across online platforms, after someone asked a query to women: would you rather find yourself stranded in a forest alongside a male or a bear? Like all the most engaging hypothetical scenarios, it exposed vastly opposing worldviews and experiences, illuminated divides among genders, and could easily to induce a deep personal dilemma if you thought about it for too long. Additionally, there came the almost inevitable follow-up in which men of a certain stripe took to the internet to tell females how stupid they had been to select the animal and proceeded to limn the consequences they deserved for that choice. This at minimum enabled those females who were uncertain over their choice to decide with renewed assurance.

Portraying the Scenario

To Cook a Bear effectively brings to life this clever small premise. The six-part drama is adapted on Scandinavian writer Mikael Niemi’s 2018 book with the identical title (translated two years later for English readers). It traces the tribulations of a pastor (the lead actor) and his household as they come to start a fresh religious post within Kengis, a remote settlement in northern Sweden, during the mid-19th century. Within a community lacking many joys, not one of the inhabitants especially appreciate his puritanical stance on alcohol and dancing, yet it is his protection of the poor – particularly the indigenous Sami, from which hails the pastor’s foster child Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in social justice and equality that places him on a collision course with the Kengis powers that be.

The Antagonists

Soon in cahoots opposing him include the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the fearsome factory proprietor the matron Sjödahl (Pernilla August), seen early on firing a newly injured laborer with minimal compensation while he is still gibbering at the sight of his pulped hand, and all others who benefit from a community easily swayed with some containers of the whisky sold by the creepy store owner the merchant Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). Although, to be fair, Lindmark’s eeriness diminishes when itinerant painter Beronius appears in the story (Simon J Berger, delivering an acting turn of exceptional unsettling intensity). If they are – similar to the clergyman – only a little more being stereotypes, they are at least effective ones.

Narrative Development

Once the foundations of tension sown, it is time to get down with the storyline. The maid employed by the doctor, Hilda (the actress), accordingly vanishes from the woods. Indications of her escape and bear markings on a tree get discovered yet she remains completely absent. Gossip and anxieties of a man/maid-eating beast prowling the woods circulate, but the pastor has another theory that he and Jussi embark to prove.

An Odd Beast

This Bear Drama is a somewhat peculiar show. It conjures a fine sense of the bleakness that lets distrust and bias and dark myths flourish based on local folklore that animals might be dominated or inhabited by the spirits of men. It avoids idealising the hardscrabble life experienced by the residents, where violence, whether that of nature or people, always looms at the periphery, waiting to erupt. Yet the personas rarely become beyond symbols – or perhaps, while the conflicts between justice and revenge, rationality and faith, virtue and wickedness escalate, representative characters within a moral tale – which stops the whole thing truly coming to life.

Stylistic Shifts

Additionally, there are the many tonally jarring instances where the clergyman’s skill to discover clues and determine the maid’s destiny turns nearly laughable. He stands looking at shattered containers and strands of fur within storage sheds like a combined Hercule Poirot and Sherlock Holmes – alongside Jussi a particularly unfortunate Hastings-cum-Watson (none of whom were required to lick a mixture of blood spatter and the boss’s spit to confirm that, yes, it was definitely coagulated blood on the site), prior to declaring his newest conclusion and pulling a body from a bog.

Clashing Agendas

The village elite are bent on proving that the maid was killed by an animal, perhaps to protect the peace, or possibly to protect a fellow elite. The pastor is bent on proving otherwise, and the evidence so quickly stacks up in his favour that once more the show’s credibility and the viewer’s patience are tested. At its best, the series is reminiscent of the TV version a few years ago of Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the opposing allures and terrors offered by science and religion. In its low points, it’s more like Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Nevertheless, it does seem to offer the response to that debated question: “Ladies, take the bear.”

• To Cook a Bear is on Disney+ currently.