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A intense debate lately went viral across online platforms, after a user asked a query for females: would you rather be lost in a forest alongside a male or a bear? Like all the best thought experiments, it exposed wildly different worldviews and experiences, illuminated chasms between the sexes, and was likely cause an existential crisis if you thought on it extensively. Additionally, there came the almost inevitable follow-up where men of a certain stripe came online to inform women how foolish they were for choosing the animal and proceeded to describe the punishments they merited for that choice. This at minimum enabled those females who had been hesitating over their choice to make it with a new confidence.

Dramatising the Setup

To Cook a Bear skillfully brings to life this clever small premise. The six-part drama is adapted from Scandinavian writer the novelist’s 2018 novel of the same name (rendered in 2020 for English readers). It traces the tribulations of a pastor (the lead actor) and his family when they arrive to begin a fresh religious post in Kengis, an isolated village in Sweden’s north, during the mid-19th century. Within a community lacking many joys, not one of the locals particularly appreciate his strict stance on alcohol and dancing, yet it is his defense of the poor – especially the indigenous Sami, from which comes the preacher’s adopted son the youth Jussi (the young actor) – and his belief in societal fairness and equality that sets him in direct opposition against the Kengis powers that be.

The Opposing Forces

Soon in cahoots against him are the lawman the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the fearsome mill owner the matron Sjödahl (Pernilla August), observed early on dismissing a recently mangled worker with a month’s pay as he remains gibbering at the sight his crushed hand, and all others who profit from a community who can be bought with some containers of the whisky sold by the unsettling store owner the merchant Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). Although, in fairness, Lindmark’s creepiness pales once travelling artist the artist Beronius arrives on the scene (the performer, 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 potent archetypes.

Narrative Development

With the seeds of conflict sown, it is time to get down with the storyline. The servant from the doctor’s house, the character Hilda (the actress), duly goes missing in the forest. Signs of her escape and animal scratches upon a trunk get discovered yet she remains nowhere to be seen. Rumours and fears of a man/maid-eating beast roaming the woods circulate, yet the clergyman holds a different view which he and his ward set out to verify.

A Strange Creation

This Bear Drama is a slightly peculiar show. It conjures a fine sense of the bleakness that lets suspicion and bias and grim legends thrive from the native legend that bears might be dominated or inhabited by the souls of humans. And it doesn’t idealising the hardscrabble life experienced by the residents, where violence, whether that of nature or mankind, lurks constantly on the edges, poised to explode. But the characters seldom evolve more than ciphers – or perhaps, as the struggles amid fairness and vengeance, logic and faith, virtue and evil escalate, representative characters in a fable – which stops the entire production truly coming to life.

Tonal Inconsistencies

And then, exist the many tonally jarring instances where the clergyman’s skill in finding evidence and discern Hilda’s fate turns nearly laughable. He stands looking at shattered containers and strands of fur in hay barns like a combined the Belgian detective and Sherlock Holmes – with Jussi a particularly unfortunate assistant figure (neither of whom were required to lick a blend of blood spatter and the boss’s spit to confirm that, yes, it was clearly coagulated blood at the crime scene), prior to declaring his latest deduction and extracting a corpse out of a swamp.

Opposing Goals

The local leaders are determined proving that Hilda met her end by an animal, maybe to protect the calm, perhaps to shield one of their own. The clergyman is intent on proving the opposite, and the proof so rapidly accumulates supporting his view that again the drama’s plausibility and the viewer’s patience get strained. In its finest moments, To Cook a Bear is reminiscent of the TV version some years back of Sarah Perry’s the serpent tale, with its evocation of the competing attractions and terrors offered by rational thought 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: “Ladies, take the bear.”

• To Cook a Bear streams on Disney+ now.