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An heated debate recently spread widely across online platforms, following a user asked the question for females: would you rather be lost in the woods with a man or a bear? Like all the best thought experiments, it revealed wildly different worldviews and life encounters, illuminated chasms among genders, and could easily to induce an existential crisis for anyone pondering on it for too long. There was also the almost inevitable coda where some males came online to tell women how stupid they were for choosing the bear and went on to limn the consequences they merited for that choice. This at minimum allowed those females who were uncertain over their choice to decide with renewed assurance.

Portraying the Setup

To Cook a Bear skillfully brings to life this clever little setup. This six-episode drama is based on Scandinavian writer Mikael Niemi’s 2018 book with the identical title (translated two years later for English readers). It follows the tribulations of a pastor (the lead actor) and his household as they come to start a new ministry within Kengis, an isolated village in Sweden’s north, in 1852. In a place with few pleasures, not one of the locals especially warm to his strict approach to alcohol and revelry, yet it is his defense of the poor – especially the indigenous Sami, from which comes the pastor’s adopted son the youth Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in societal fairness and equal rights that sets him on a collision course with the Kengis local authorities.

The Antagonists

Quickly in cahoots against him are the lawman the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the intimidating mill owner the matron Sjödahl (the actress), seen initially dismissing a recently mangled worker with minimal compensation while he is still gibbering at the sight of his pulped hand, and anyone else who benefit from a community who can be bought with some containers of the whisky provided by the unsettling shopkeeper the merchant Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s eeriness diminishes when itinerant painter Beronius arrives on the scene (Simon J Berger, providing an acting turn of exceptional unsettling intensity). If they are – like the pastor himself – just slightly beyond being stereotypes, they still serve as effective ones.

Narrative Development

With the seeds of conflict sown, it is time to get down to narrative business. The servant from the doctor’s house, the character Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), duly goes missing from the woods. Signs of her flight and animal scratches upon a trunk get discovered yet she remains completely absent. Rumours and fears regarding a human-devouring bear prowling the woodland circulate, but the pastor has another theory that he and Jussi set out to verify.

An Odd Beast

This Bear Drama is a somewhat peculiar show. It creates a fine sense of the desolation that allows suspicion and prejudice and dark myths flourish from the native legend that animals might be dominated or inhabited by the souls of men. And it doesn’t romanticise the tough existence led by the villagers, in which violence, be it from nature or mankind, lurks constantly on the edges, poised to explode. Yet the personas seldom evolve beyond symbols – or perhaps, while the conflicts amid fairness and revenge, rationality and religion, virtue and evil intensify, emblematic figures in a fable – which stops the whole thing truly becoming immersive.

Stylistic Shifts

And then, exist the many tonally jarring moments where the pastor’s ability in finding evidence and discern the maid’s destiny turns nearly laughable. He stands observing broken milk pots and clumps of hair in hay barns as a fusion of the Belgian detective and Sherlock Holmes – alongside Jussi a particularly unfortunate Hastings-cum-Watson (neither of whom had to lick a blend of blood droplets and saliva from his superior to agree that indeed, it was clearly dried blood at the crime scene), before announcing his newest conclusion and extracting a corpse out of a swamp.

Clashing Agendas

The village elite are bent on proving that the maid met her end by an animal, perhaps to protect the calm, perhaps to shield a fellow elite. The pastor is intent on establishing the opposite, and the proof so quickly stacks up in his favour that again the show’s credibility and the viewer’s patience are tested. In its finest moments, the series is reminiscent of the adaptation some years back of Sarah Perry’s the serpent tale, through its portrayal of the opposing allures and fears presented by rational thought and religion. In its low points, it resembles Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Nevertheless, it appears to provide the response to that debated question: “Females, choose the animal.”

• The series is on Disney+ currently.