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An heated debate recently spread widely on social media, after a user asked a query to women: which would you prefer be lost in the woods alongside a male or a bear? Like all the best thought experiments, it exposed vastly opposing perspectives and experiences, highlighted chasms between the sexes, and could easily to induce a deep personal dilemma if you thought about it for too long. Additionally, there came the predictable follow-up where some males came online to tell women how foolish they were to select the animal and proceeded to limn the punishments they merited for that choice. This at least allowed the women who were uncertain over their choice to make it with a new confidence.

Dramatising the Scenario

To Cook a Bear effectively brings to life this nifty small premise. This six-episode drama is adapted from Swedish author Mikael Niemi’s 2018 book with the identical title (rendered in 2020 for English readers). It traces the tribulations of a clergyman (the lead actor) and his household as they come to begin a new ministry within Kengis, an isolated village in northern Sweden, during the mid-19th century. Within a community lacking many joys, none of the inhabitants especially appreciate his puritanical stance on drinking and revelry, yet it is his defense of the poor – especially the indigenous Sami, from among whom hails the preacher’s adopted son the youth Jussi (the young actor) – and his conviction in societal fairness and equal rights that places him in direct opposition against the Kengis local authorities.

The Opposing Forces

Soon in cahoots opposing him are the lawman Brahe (the performer), the fearsome mill owner the matron Sjödahl (Pernilla August), seen early on firing a recently mangled laborer with minimal compensation as he remains gibbering upon seeing his crushed hand, and anyone else who benefit from a community who can be bought for a few bottles of liquor sold by the unsettling shopkeeper the merchant Lindmark (the actor). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s creepiness diminishes when travelling artist the artist Beronius arrives on the scene (Simon J Berger, delivering a performance of rare unsettling intensity). If they are – like the pastor himself – just slightly beyond than caricatures, they still serve as effective ones.

Narrative Development

Once the foundations of tension sown, it is time to proceed to narrative business. The maid from the doctor’s house, the character Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), duly goes missing from the woods. Signs of her escape and bear markings on a tree get discovered yet she remains nowhere to be seen. Rumours and anxieties regarding a human-devouring bear prowling the woodland spread, yet the clergyman has another theory that he and Jussi embark to verify.

An Odd Beast

To Cook a Bear is a slightly odd beast. It conjures a fine sense of the bleakness that lets suspicion and prejudice and dark myths flourish based on local folklore that animals can be controlled or possessed by the spirits of humans. And it doesn’t romanticise the tough existence led by the villagers, in which violence, whether that of nature or people, lurks constantly on the edges, waiting to erupt. Yet the personas seldom evolve more than ciphers – or perhaps, while the conflicts amid fairness and vengeance, logic and faith, good and wickedness escalate, emblematic figures in a fable – preventing the entire production fully becoming immersive.

Tonal Inconsistencies

And then, exist the many tonally jarring instances in which the pastor’s ability in finding evidence and determine Hilda’s fate turns almost risible. He stands observing broken milk pots and clumps of hair in hay barns as a fusion of Hercule Poirot and Sherlock Holmes – alongside Jussi a particularly unfortunate Hastings-cum-Watson (neither of whom were required to lick a mixture of blood spatter and the boss’s spit to confirm that, yes, it was definitely dried blood at the crime scene), before announcing his newest conclusion and extracting a body from a bog.

Opposing Goals

The village elite are bent on demonstrating that the maid met her end by a bear, perhaps to preserve the calm, perhaps to protect a fellow elite. The pastor is bent on establishing otherwise, and the proof so rapidly accumulates supporting his view that once more the show’s credibility and the viewer’s patience are tested. In its finest moments, To Cook a Bear is reminiscent of the adaptation a few years ago of the author’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the opposing attractions and terrors presented by science and belief. In its low points, it resembles Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Nevertheless, it does seem to offer the response to the earlier query: “Ladies, take the bear.”

• The series is on Disney+ currently.