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An intense debate recently went viral across online platforms, following someone posed a query for females: which would you prefer find yourself stranded in a forest alongside a male or with a bear? Like all the most engaging thought experiments, it revealed wildly different perspectives and life encounters, highlighted divides between the sexes, and was likely cause an existential crisis for anyone pondering about it extensively. Additionally, there came the almost inevitable follow-up where men of a certain stripe took to the internet to inform females how foolish they had been for choosing the bear and went on to describe the punishments they merited for that choice. This at least enabled the women who had been hesitating over their choice to make it with a new confidence.

Portraying the Scenario

To Cook a Bear skillfully brings to life this clever little setup. This six-episode series is adapted from Swedish author the novelist’s 2018 novel of the same name (rendered two years later for an English audience). It traces the tribulations of a clergyman (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his household when they arrive to begin a fresh religious post within Kengis, a remote village in northern Sweden, during the mid-19th century. In a place with few pleasures, none of the locals particularly appreciate his strict stance on drinking and revelry, yet it is his defense of the poor – particularly the native Sami population, from which comes the preacher’s foster child the youth Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in social justice and equality that sets him in direct opposition against the Kengis powers that be.

The Antagonists

Quickly in cahoots against him are the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the intimidating factory proprietor the matron Sjödahl (Pernilla August), observed early on firing a newly injured worker with minimal compensation as he remains babbling upon seeing of his pulped hand, and all others who benefit from a community easily swayed for a few bottles of liquor provided by the unsettling store owner Lindmark (the actor). Although, in fairness, Lindmark’s creepiness diminishes when itinerant painter the artist Beronius arrives in the story (the performer, providing an acting turn of rare discomfiting power). While they remain – like the pastor himself – just slightly beyond being stereotypes, they still serve as potent archetypes.

Plot Progression

With the seeds of tension sown, the moment arrives to get down to narrative business. The servant employed by the doctor, Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), duly goes missing in the forest. Indications of her escape and bear markings upon a trunk get discovered but she is nowhere to be seen. Rumours and fears of a man/maid-eating bear roaming the woods circulate, yet the clergyman holds a different view which he and his ward set out to verify.

An Odd Beast

To Cook a Bear is a somewhat odd beast. It creates a fine sense of the desolation that lets distrust and bias and grim legends flourish based on local folklore that bears might be dominated or possessed by the spirits of men. It avoids romanticise the tough existence experienced by the villagers, in which violence, whether that of nature or people, always looms at the periphery, waiting to erupt. But the characters seldom evolve more than ciphers – or perhaps, as the struggles amid fairness and vengeance, rationality and faith, virtue 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 stylistically clashing instances in which the pastor’s ability to discover clues and discern the maid’s destiny becomes nearly laughable. He positions himself looking at shattered containers and clumps of hair in hay barns as a fusion of Hercule Poirot the English sleuth – with Jussi a particularly unfortunate Hastings-cum-Watson (none of whom were required to taste a blend of blood droplets and the boss’s spit to agree that indeed, it was definitely coagulated blood on the site), before announcing his latest deduction and extracting a body out of a swamp.

Clashing Agendas

The local leaders are determined proving that Hilda was killed by an animal, maybe to preserve the peace, or possibly to shield one of their own. The pastor is bent on establishing otherwise, and the proof so rapidly accumulates supporting his view that once more the drama’s plausibility and the viewer’s patience are tested. In its finest moments, the series is reminiscent of the adaptation some years back of the author’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the competing allures and terrors presented by rational thought and religion. In its low points, it resembles Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Still, it does seem to provide the answer to the earlier query: “Ladies, take the bear.”

• To Cook a Bear streams on Disney+ currently.