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An heated debate lately went viral across online platforms, after a user asked a query for females: which would you prefer find yourself stranded in the woods alongside a male or with a bear? Like all the most engaging thought experiments, it exposed wildly different perspectives and life encounters, highlighted chasms among genders, and was likely to induce a deep personal dilemma if you thought about it extensively. There was also the predictable follow-up where some males came online to inform women how stupid they were to select the bear and went on to limn the consequences they deserved for it. This at least enabled the women who had been hesitating over their choice to make it with a new confidence.

Dramatising the Setup

To Cook a Bear effectively dramatises this nifty small premise. This six-episode series is based from Scandinavian writer Mikael Niemi’s 2018 novel of the same name (translated in 2020 for English readers). It traces the struggles of a pastor (the lead actor) and his family when they arrive to begin a fresh religious post within Kengis, an isolated settlement in northern Sweden, during the mid-19th century. Within a community with few pleasures, not one of the inhabitants especially warm to his strict approach to alcohol and dancing, yet it is his defense of impoverished people – especially the native Sami population, from which comes the pastor’s adopted son the youth Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his conviction in societal fairness and equal rights that sets him in direct opposition against the Kengis powers that be.

The Antagonists

Soon in cahoots against him include the lawman Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the intimidating factory proprietor the matron Sjödahl (Pernilla August), observed initially firing a newly injured laborer with a month’s pay while he is still gibbering at the sight his crushed hand, and anyone else who benefit from a community easily swayed with some containers of liquor provided by the creepy store owner Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). However, in fairness, Lindmark’s creepiness pales once itinerant painter the artist Beronius arrives in the story (Simon J Berger, providing an acting turn of rare discomfiting power). If they are – similar to the clergyman – only a little more being stereotypes, they are at least effective ones.

Narrative Development

Once the foundations of tension sown, it is time to get down to narrative business. The maid from the doctor’s house, Hilda (the actress), duly goes missing in the forest. Indications of her flight and animal scratches on a tree are found yet she remains completely absent. Gossip and fears regarding a human-devouring beast roaming the woods spread, but the pastor has another theory which he and his ward embark to prove.

An Odd Beast

This Bear Drama is a somewhat peculiar show. It creates a strong impression of the desolation that allows suspicion and prejudice and dark myths thrive from the native legend that animals might be dominated or inhabited by the souls of humans. And it doesn’t idealising the hardscrabble life led by the residents, in which brutality, whether that of nature or mankind, always looms on the edges, poised to explode. Yet the personas seldom evolve beyond symbols – or perhaps, as the struggles between justice and revenge, rationality and religion, virtue and evil intensify, emblematic figures within a moral tale – preventing the whole thing truly becoming immersive.

Stylistic Shifts

Additionally, exist the many tonally jarring instances in which the clergyman’s skill to discover clues and determine Hilda’s fate becomes almost risible. He positions himself observing broken milk pots and clumps of hair within storage sheds as a fusion of the Belgian detective and Sherlock Holmes – alongside Jussi a rather hapless assistant figure (neither of whom had to taste a mixture of blood spatter and the boss’s spit to confirm that, yes, it was definitely dried blood on the site), before announcing his latest deduction and pulling a body out of a swamp.

Clashing Agendas

The local leaders are determined proving that the maid was killed by a bear, maybe to protect the calm, or possibly to protect one of their own. The clergyman is bent on establishing otherwise, and the proof so quickly stacks up supporting his view that once more the drama’s plausibility and the viewer’s patience are tested. In its finest moments, the series evokes memories of the TV version a few years ago of Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, through its portrayal of the competing attractions and terrors offered by rational thought and belief. At its worst, it’s more like Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Still, it does seem to offer the answer to that debated question: “Ladies, take the bear.”

• To Cook a Bear streams on Disney+ currently.