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A heated debate recently spread widely across online platforms, after a user asked the question to women: which would you prefer find yourself stranded in a forest alongside a male or a bear? Like all the best thought experiments, it exposed wildly different worldviews and experiences, illuminated chasms among genders, and could easily cause an existential crisis for anyone pondering about it extensively. Additionally, there came the predictable follow-up in which men of a certain stripe came online to tell women how foolish they had been for choosing the bear and proceeded to describe the consequences they deserved for it. This at least enabled the women who were uncertain about their decision to decide with renewed assurance.

Dramatising the Scenario

To Cook a Bear effectively brings to life this nifty small premise. The six-part series is based on Scandinavian writer the novelist’s 2018 novel with the identical title (translated two years later for English readers). It traces the struggles of a clergyman (the lead actor) and his family when they arrive to start a new ministry in Kengis, an isolated village in Sweden’s north, during the mid-19th century. Within a community lacking many joys, none of the inhabitants particularly warm to his puritanical stance on alcohol and dancing, but it is his defense of impoverished people – particularly the native Sami population, from which hails the pastor’s adopted son the youth Jussi (the young actor) – and his conviction in societal fairness and equal rights that sets him on a collision course with the Kengis local authorities.

The Opposing Forces

Soon collaborating against him are the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the fearsome mill owner the matron Sjödahl (the actress), observed initially dismissing a recently mangled worker with minimal compensation while he is still gibbering upon seeing of his pulped hand, and all others who benefit from a populace easily swayed with some containers of liquor sold by the creepy shopkeeper the merchant Lindmark (the actor). Although, to be fair, Lindmark’s creepiness diminishes once itinerant painter Beronius arrives on the scene (the performer, delivering an acting turn of exceptional discomfiting power). While they remain – like the pastor himself – only a little more being stereotypes, they are at least potent archetypes.

Narrative Development

With the seeds of tension planted, it is time to proceed to narrative business. The maid from the doctor’s house, the character Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), accordingly goes missing from the woods. Indications of her escape and animal scratches on a tree get discovered but she is completely absent. Gossip and anxieties of a man/maid-eating beast prowling the woodland spread, yet the clergyman has another theory that he and Jussi set out to verify.

A Strange Creation

This Bear Drama is a somewhat odd beast. It creates a fine sense of the bleakness that lets distrust and prejudice and dark myths flourish based on local folklore that animals might be dominated or possessed by the souls of men. And it doesn’t romanticise the hardscrabble life led by the residents, in which violence, whether that of nature or people, always looms at the periphery, waiting to erupt. But the characters rarely become beyond symbols – or perhaps, while the conflicts amid fairness and revenge, rationality and faith, virtue and wickedness escalate, emblematic figures within a moral tale – which stops the whole thing truly becoming immersive.

Stylistic Shifts

Additionally, exist numerous tonally jarring instances where the clergyman’s skill in finding evidence and determine Hilda’s fate becomes almost risible. He stands observing broken milk pots and strands of fur within storage sheds like a combined Hercule Poirot and Sherlock Holmes – with Jussi a particularly unfortunate Hastings-cum-Watson (neither of whom were required to taste a blend of blood droplets and the boss’s spit to confirm that, yes, it was definitely coagulated blood at the crime scene), prior to declaring his latest deduction and pulling a corpse out of a swamp.

Opposing Goals

The local leaders are bent on proving that Hilda was killed by a bear, maybe to protect the peace, or possibly to shield a fellow elite. The pastor is intent on proving the opposite, and the evidence so rapidly accumulates supporting his view that again the drama’s plausibility and audience tolerance get strained. In its finest moments, the series evokes memories of the TV version some years back of the author’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the competing allures and fears offered by science and belief. In its low points, it’s more like Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Still, it does seem to provide the response to the earlier query: “Females, choose the animal.”

• The series streams on Disney+ now.