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An intense debate recently went viral on social media, after a user posed a query to women: which would you prefer be lost in the woods with a man or a bear? Similar to the best hypothetical scenarios, it exposed vastly opposing worldviews and life encounters, illuminated divides among genders, and was likely cause a deep personal dilemma for anyone pondering about it for too long. Additionally, there came the almost inevitable follow-up in which some males came online to tell females how stupid they were for choosing the animal and proceeded to describe the consequences they deserved for it. This at minimum enabled those females who had been hesitating over their choice to make it with renewed assurance.

Dramatising the Setup

To Cook a Bear effectively brings to life this nifty little setup. This six-episode drama is adapted on Scandinavian writer Mikael Niemi’s 2018 novel of the same name (translated two years later for an English audience). It traces the tribulations of a clergyman (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his family when they arrive to begin a new ministry within Kengis, an isolated settlement in northern Sweden, in 1852. In a place with few pleasures, none of the inhabitants particularly warm to his puritanical stance on drinking and dancing, but it is his defense of impoverished people – particularly the native Sami population, from which comes the preacher’s adopted son the youth Jussi (the young actor) – and his belief in social justice and equality that sets him in direct opposition with the Kengis local authorities.

The Antagonists

Quickly collaborating against him are the lawman Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the fearsome factory proprietor the matron Sjödahl (the actress), seen early on dismissing a newly injured worker with minimal compensation while he is still babbling upon seeing of his pulped hand, and anyone else who profit from a populace who can be bought with some containers of liquor sold by the unsettling store owner Lindmark (the actor). However, in fairness, Lindmark’s creepiness pales once itinerant painter the artist Beronius arrives on the scene (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 still serve as potent archetypes.

Narrative Development

With the seeds of conflict planted, the moment arrives to get down to narrative business. The servant employed by the doctor, Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), duly goes missing from the woods. Signs of her escape and animal scratches upon a trunk are found but she is nowhere to be seen. Rumours and anxieties of a man/maid-eating bear prowling the woods circulate, yet the clergyman holds a different view which he and his ward set out to verify.

A Strange Creation

To Cook a Bear is a somewhat odd beast. It conjures a fine sense of the desolation that lets distrust and bias and grim legends flourish based on local folklore that animals can be controlled or inhabited by the souls of men. It avoids idealising the tough existence experienced by the residents, in which brutality, whether that of nature or mankind, always looms on the edges, poised to explode. But the characters rarely become more than ciphers – or maybe, as the struggles between justice and vengeance, logic and religion, good and wickedness escalate, emblematic figures in a fable – preventing the whole thing truly becoming immersive.

Stylistic Shifts

Additionally, exist the many stylistically clashing moments in which the clergyman’s skill to discover clues and discern Hilda’s fate becomes almost risible. He stands observing broken milk pots and clumps of hair within storage sheds as a fusion of Hercule Poirot the English sleuth – with Jussi a particularly unfortunate Hastings-cum-Watson (none of whom had to taste a blend of blood droplets and the boss’s spit to agree that, yes, it was definitely dried blood at the crime scene), prior to declaring his latest deduction and extracting a corpse out of a swamp.

Opposing Goals

The village elite are bent on proving that Hilda met her end by an animal, maybe to protect the calm, perhaps to shield a fellow elite. The clergyman is intent on establishing otherwise, and the evidence so rapidly stacks up supporting his view that again the drama’s plausibility and the viewer’s patience are tested. In its finest moments, To Cook a Bear evokes memories of the adaptation a few years ago of Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, through its portrayal of the competing allures and terrors presented by rational thought and religion. At its worst, it’s more like a bear-themed police procedural. Still, it appears to offer the answer to that debated question: “Ladies, take the bear.”

• The series is on Disney+ currently.