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A intense debate lately went viral across online platforms, following someone asked the question for females: would you rather be lost in the woods alongside a male or with a bear? Like all the most engaging hypothetical scenarios, it exposed vastly opposing worldviews and life encounters, illuminated divides among genders, and was likely cause a deep personal dilemma if you thought about it for too long. Additionally, there came the predictable coda where some males took to the internet to tell females how foolish they had been for choosing the bear and went on to limn the consequences they deserved for that choice. This at least enabled the women who had been hesitating over their choice to decide with renewed assurance.

Portraying the Scenario

To Cook a Bear skillfully dramatises this clever small premise. The six-part drama is based from Swedish author Mikael Niemi’s 2018 book of the same name (rendered 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 in Kengis, an isolated village in Sweden’s north, during the mid-19th century. In a place with few pleasures, none of the inhabitants particularly warm to his puritanical approach to alcohol and revelry, but it is his protection of the poor – especially the native Sami population, from among whom hails the preacher’s foster child Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his conviction in societal fairness and equal rights that places him in direct opposition with the Kengis powers that be.

The Antagonists

Quickly in cahoots against him include the lawman Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the intimidating mill owner the matron Sjödahl (the actress), seen early on dismissing a newly injured laborer with minimal compensation as he remains babbling at the sight of his pulped hand, and anyone else who benefit from a community who can be bought with some containers of liquor sold by the creepy store owner the merchant Lindmark (the actor). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s eeriness pales once travelling artist Beronius appears on the scene (the performer, providing an acting turn of rare discomfiting power). While they remain – similar to the clergyman – just slightly beyond being stereotypes, they are at least potent archetypes.

Narrative Development

With the seeds of conflict planted, it is time to get down to narrative business. The servant from the doctor’s house, Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), accordingly goes missing from the woods. Signs of her escape and animal scratches on a tree get discovered but she is nowhere to be seen. Rumours and anxieties regarding a human-devouring beast roaming the woods circulate, but the pastor holds a different view that he and Jussi set out to verify.

An Odd Beast

To Cook a Bear is a somewhat odd beast. It conjures a fine sense of the desolation that allows distrust and bias and dark myths thrive based on local folklore that animals can be controlled or possessed by the souls of humans. And it doesn’t romanticise the hardscrabble life experienced by the villagers, in which violence, whether that of nature or people, lurks constantly on the edges, waiting to erupt. Yet the personas rarely become more than ciphers – or maybe, as the struggles amid fairness and vengeance, rationality and faith, virtue and evil intensify, emblematic figures within a moral tale – which stops the whole thing truly becoming immersive.

Stylistic Shifts

Additionally, there are the many tonally jarring moments where the clergyman’s skill to discover clues and discern Hilda’s fate turns almost risible. He positions himself observing broken milk pots and strands of fur in hay barns like a combined Hercule Poirot the English sleuth – alongside Jussi a particularly unfortunate assistant figure (none of whom had to lick a blend of blood droplets and saliva from his superior to agree that indeed, it was clearly dried blood on the site), prior to declaring his latest deduction and pulling a corpse from a bog.

Opposing Goals

The village elite are determined proving that Hilda met her end by a bear, perhaps to protect the calm, perhaps to shield one of their own. The clergyman is bent on establishing the opposite, and the evidence so quickly stacks up supporting his view that again the show’s credibility and the viewer’s patience are tested. At its best, the series is reminiscent of the adaptation a few years ago of Sarah Perry’s the serpent tale, with its evocation of the opposing attractions and terrors offered by rational thought and religion. At its worst, it’s more like Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Still, it does seem to offer the response to that debated question: “Ladies, take the bear.”

• The series streams on Disney+ now.