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A intense discussion lately spread widely on social media, following someone posed a query to women: which would you prefer find yourself stranded in a forest alongside a male or with a bear? Like all the most engaging hypothetical scenarios, it exposed vastly opposing perspectives and life encounters, illuminated chasms between the sexes, and could easily to induce a deep personal dilemma for anyone pondering on it for too long. Additionally, there came the predictable follow-up where men of a certain stripe came online to tell females how stupid they had been for choosing the animal and proceeded to limn the consequences they merited for it. This at least enabled those females who had been hesitating about their decision to decide with a new confidence.

Portraying the Setup

To Cook a Bear skillfully dramatises this nifty little setup. This six-episode drama is adapted on Swedish author Mikael Niemi’s 2018 novel with the identical title (translated two years later for an English audience). It follows the tribulations of a pastor (the lead actor) and his family as they come to start a fresh religious post within Kengis, a remote settlement in northern Sweden, during the mid-19th century. In a place with few pleasures, not one of the inhabitants especially warm to his strict approach to alcohol and dancing, but it is his protection of impoverished people – particularly the indigenous Sami, from among whom hails the preacher’s adopted son the youth Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in social justice and equal rights that sets him in direct opposition against the Kengis local authorities.

The Opposing Forces

Soon collaborating against him include the lawman Brahe (the performer), the intimidating factory proprietor Madam Sjödahl (Pernilla August), seen early on firing a newly injured worker with a month’s pay while he is still gibbering upon seeing his crushed hand, and anyone else who benefit from a community easily swayed for a few bottles of liquor provided by the unsettling shopkeeper the merchant Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). Although, in fairness, Lindmark’s eeriness pales when itinerant painter the artist Beronius arrives on the scene (the performer, delivering a performance of rare unsettling intensity). While they remain – like the pastor himself – only a little more being stereotypes, they are at least potent archetypes.

Narrative Development

Once the foundations of tension planted, it is time to proceed to narrative business. The maid from the doctor’s house, Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), duly vanishes from the woods. Indications of her flight and animal scratches upon a trunk get discovered yet she remains nowhere to be seen. Rumours and anxieties regarding a human-devouring bear prowling the woods circulate, yet the clergyman has another theory which he and his ward embark to verify.

A Strange Creation

This Bear Drama is a slightly peculiar show. It conjures a strong impression of the desolation that allows distrust and prejudice 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 tough existence led by the residents, in which brutality, be it from nature or people, always looms at the periphery, waiting to erupt. But the characters rarely become beyond symbols – or perhaps, while the conflicts between justice and vengeance, logic and religion, good and wickedness escalate, representative characters in a fable – which stops the whole thing truly becoming immersive.

Stylistic Shifts

And then, there are numerous stylistically clashing instances where the clergyman’s skill to discover clues and discern Hilda’s fate turns almost risible. He stands observing shattered containers and strands of fur in hay barns like a combined the Belgian detective and Sherlock Holmes – alongside Jussi a rather hapless assistant figure (none of whom were required to taste a blend of blood spatter and the boss’s spit to agree that, yes, it was definitely coagulated blood at the crime scene), before announcing his newest conclusion and pulling a corpse from a bog.

Opposing Goals

The local leaders are determined proving that the maid met her end by a bear, maybe to protect the peace, perhaps to shield one of their own. The clergyman is intent on establishing otherwise, and the proof so quickly stacks up in his favour that once more the drama’s plausibility and the viewer’s patience get strained. In its finest moments, the series evokes memories of the adaptation some years back of the author’s the serpent tale, with its evocation of the competing attractions and terrors offered by rational thought and belief. In its low points, it resembles Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Nevertheless, it appears to provide the answer to that debated question: “Females, choose the animal.”

• The series streams on Disney+ now.