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A heated debate recently spread widely across online platforms, after someone posed a query for females: would you rather find yourself stranded in a forest alongside a male or a bear? Like all the most engaging hypothetical scenarios, it exposed wildly different worldviews and life encounters, highlighted divides among genders, and could easily cause an existential crisis if you thought about it for too long. There was also the predictable coda in which men of a certain stripe came online to tell females how foolish they had been for choosing the animal and went on to limn the punishments they deserved for it. This at minimum allowed those females who were uncertain about their decision to decide with a new confidence.

Dramatising the Scenario

To Cook a Bear effectively brings to life this nifty small premise. The six-part series is based on Swedish author Mikael Niemi’s 2018 book with the identical title (translated two years later for an English audience). It follows the struggles of a pastor (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his family when they arrive to start a new ministry within Kengis, an isolated village in Sweden’s north, in 1852. Within a community with few pleasures, none of the locals particularly warm to his strict stance on alcohol and dancing, but it is his protection of the poor – particularly the native Sami population, from which comes the preacher’s adopted son Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his conviction in societal fairness and equality that places him on a collision course with the Kengis powers that be.

The Opposing Forces

Soon collaborating against him are the sheriff the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the fearsome factory proprietor the matron Sjödahl (Pernilla August), observed initially dismissing a newly injured laborer with a month’s pay while he is still gibbering upon seeing his crushed hand, and anyone else who benefit from a populace easily swayed with some containers of the whisky provided by the creepy store owner Lindmark (the actor). Although, to be fair, Lindmark’s creepiness diminishes once itinerant painter the artist Beronius arrives in the story (Simon J Berger, providing an acting turn of exceptional discomfiting power). If they are – like the pastor himself – only a little more than caricatures, they are at least potent archetypes.

Plot Progression

Once the foundations of tension sown, it is time to proceed with the storyline. The servant from the doctor’s house, the character Hilda (the actress), duly goes missing in the forest. Signs of her flight and bear markings upon a trunk get discovered but she is completely absent. Gossip and fears regarding a human-devouring bear roaming the woodland circulate, but the pastor holds a different view that he and Jussi set out to verify.

A Strange Creation

To Cook a Bear is a somewhat odd beast. It conjures a strong impression of the bleakness that allows suspicion and bias and grim legends flourish from the native legend that animals can be controlled or inhabited by the spirits of humans. And it doesn’t romanticise the tough existence led by the villagers, where violence, be it from nature or mankind, always looms on the edges, poised to explode. But the characters rarely become beyond symbols – or perhaps, as the struggles amid fairness and vengeance, rationality and religion, virtue and evil escalate, emblematic figures within a moral tale – which stops the entire production fully coming to life.

Tonal Inconsistencies

And then, exist numerous tonally jarring moments where the pastor’s ability to discover clues and determine Hilda’s fate turns almost risible. He stands observing broken milk pots and strands of fur within storage sheds as a fusion of Hercule Poirot the English sleuth – with Jussi a particularly unfortunate Hastings-cum-Watson (neither of whom had to lick a blend of blood spatter and saliva from his superior to agree that indeed, it was definitely dried blood on the site), prior to declaring his newest conclusion and extracting a corpse from a bog.

Clashing Agendas

The village elite are determined proving that the maid was killed by a bear, maybe to protect the calm, perhaps to protect a fellow elite. The pastor is bent on establishing the opposite, and the proof so quickly accumulates in his favour that once more the show’s credibility and audience tolerance are tested. In its finest moments, To Cook a Bear evokes memories of the TV version a few years ago of the author’s the serpent tale, through its portrayal of the opposing attractions and terrors offered by science and religion. At its worst, it resembles a bear-themed police procedural. Nevertheless, it does seem to provide the answer to that debated question: “Females, choose the animal.”

• The series streams on Disney+ now.