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An intense debate recently went viral across online platforms, after someone asked a query for females: would you rather be lost in the woods with a man or with a bear? Like all the best thought experiments, it revealed wildly different perspectives and experiences, illuminated chasms among genders, and could easily to induce an existential crisis if you thought about it for too long. There was also the predictable follow-up in which some males came online to tell females how stupid they had been for choosing the bear and proceeded to describe the punishments they merited for that choice. This at least allowed the women who were uncertain about their decision to decide with a new confidence.

Dramatising the Setup

The Bear-Cooking Tale effectively dramatises this clever little setup. The six-part series is adapted from Swedish author the novelist’s 2018 book of the same name (translated two years later for an English audience). It traces the tribulations of a clergyman (the lead actor) and his household as they come to begin a new ministry in Kengis, a remote village in Sweden’s north, during the mid-19th century. Within a community lacking many joys, not one of the inhabitants particularly appreciate his puritanical stance on drinking and revelry, but it is his defense of the poor – especially the indigenous Sami, from among whom comes the preacher’s adopted son the youth Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in societal fairness and equality that places him in direct opposition against the Kengis local authorities.

The Opposing Forces

Soon collaborating opposing him are the sheriff the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the intimidating mill owner the matron Sjödahl (Pernilla August), observed early on dismissing a recently mangled worker with a month’s pay while he is still babbling at the sight his crushed hand, and all others who profit from a populace easily swayed with some containers of liquor provided by the unsettling shopkeeper the merchant Lindmark (the actor). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s creepiness pales when itinerant painter the artist Beronius appears in the story (the performer, providing an acting turn of exceptional discomfiting power). If they are – like the pastor himself – just slightly beyond than caricatures, they are at least potent archetypes.

Narrative Development

Once the foundations of conflict planted, it is time to get down with the storyline. The servant from the doctor’s house, the character Hilda (the actress), duly vanishes from the woods. Indications of her flight and animal scratches upon a trunk are found yet she remains nowhere to be seen. Gossip and fears regarding a human-devouring bear roaming the woodland circulate, but the pastor holds a different view which he and his ward set out to verify.

A Strange Creation

To Cook a Bear is a slightly peculiar show. It conjures a strong impression of the bleakness that allows suspicion and prejudice and dark myths thrive based on local folklore that bears might be dominated or inhabited by the souls of humans. It avoids romanticise the tough existence led by the villagers, in which brutality, be it from the wild or mankind, always looms on the edges, poised to explode. But the characters seldom evolve beyond symbols – or perhaps, as the struggles between justice and revenge, logic and religion, virtue and wickedness intensify, emblematic figures in a fable – preventing the whole thing fully becoming immersive.

Stylistic Shifts

And then, exist numerous tonally jarring moments in which the pastor’s ability to discover clues and discern Hilda’s fate turns almost risible. He stands looking at broken milk pots and strands of fur in hay barns like a combined Hercule Poirot and Sherlock Holmes – alongside Jussi a particularly unfortunate assistant figure (none of whom had to lick a mixture of blood droplets and saliva from his superior to agree that, yes, it was clearly coagulated blood at the crime scene), prior to declaring his newest conclusion and pulling a body out of a swamp.

Clashing Agendas

The local leaders are bent on proving that the maid was killed by an animal, maybe to preserve the calm, or possibly to shield a fellow elite. The pastor is intent on proving the opposite, 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 adaptation some years back of Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the opposing attractions and fears presented by science and belief. At its worst, it’s more like Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Nevertheless, it appears to provide the response to that debated question: “Ladies, take the bear.”

• To Cook a Bear streams on Disney+ currently.