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An heated debate recently went viral across online platforms, following a user asked the question to women: which would you prefer find yourself stranded in the woods with a man or with a bear? Similar to the most engaging thought experiments, it exposed vastly opposing worldviews and experiences, illuminated chasms between the sexes, and could easily to induce a deep personal dilemma for anyone pondering about it for too long. Additionally, there came the almost inevitable follow-up where some males took to the internet to tell women how foolish they were to select the animal and proceeded to limn the consequences they merited for it. This at minimum enabled those females who had been hesitating over their choice to decide with renewed assurance.

Dramatising the Scenario

To Cook a Bear effectively dramatises this nifty small premise. The six-part drama is adapted from Scandinavian writer Mikael Niemi’s 2018 novel of the same name (translated two years later for an English audience). It follows the struggles of a clergyman (the lead actor) and his household as they come to begin 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 particularly appreciate his strict approach to drinking and dancing, but it is his defense of the poor – particularly the indigenous Sami, from among whom comes the preacher’s adopted son Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his conviction in societal fairness and equal rights that sets him on a collision course against the Kengis local authorities.

The Opposing Forces

Quickly in cahoots against him are the lawman the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the intimidating mill owner Madam Sjödahl (the actress), seen early on dismissing a newly injured worker with minimal compensation as he remains gibbering upon seeing of his pulped hand, and anyone else who profit from a populace who can be bought with some containers of liquor provided by the unsettling shopkeeper the merchant Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). Although, to be fair, Lindmark’s creepiness diminishes when itinerant painter Beronius arrives in the story (the performer, providing an acting turn of exceptional unsettling intensity). While they remain – similar to the clergyman – just slightly beyond than caricatures, they are at least potent archetypes.

Narrative Development

Once the foundations of tension sown, it is time to proceed with the storyline. The maid employed by the doctor, the character Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), accordingly goes missing from the woods. Signs of her escape and animal scratches upon a trunk are found yet she remains nowhere to be seen. Rumours and anxieties of a man/maid-eating beast roaming the woods circulate, yet the clergyman holds a different view that he and Jussi embark to prove.

An Odd Beast

This Bear Drama is a somewhat odd beast. It creates a strong impression of the desolation that lets distrust and prejudice and grim legends flourish based on local folklore that bears can be controlled or possessed by the spirits of humans. It avoids romanticise the hardscrabble life experienced by the residents, where violence, be it from the wild or mankind, always looms at the periphery, waiting to erupt. But the characters seldom evolve beyond symbols – or maybe, while the conflicts amid fairness and revenge, rationality and faith, virtue and evil escalate, emblematic figures in a fable – which stops the whole thing truly becoming immersive.

Stylistic Shifts

And then, exist the many stylistically clashing instances where the pastor’s ability to discover clues and discern the maid’s destiny becomes almost risible. He positions himself observing shattered containers and clumps of hair within storage sheds like a combined Hercule Poirot the English sleuth – with Jussi a rather hapless Hastings-cum-Watson (neither of whom had to taste a mixture 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 body out of a swamp.

Opposing Goals

The local leaders are bent on proving that the maid was killed by an animal, perhaps to preserve the calm, perhaps to protect a fellow elite. The clergyman is bent on establishing otherwise, and the proof so quickly stacks up in his favour that again the drama’s plausibility and audience tolerance are tested. At its best, the series evokes memories of the adaptation a few years ago of Sarah Perry’s the serpent tale, with its evocation of the competing attractions and terrors presented by science and belief. At its worst, 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+ now.