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An heated discussion lately spread widely on social media, following someone asked a query to women: which would you prefer find yourself stranded in the woods alongside a male or a bear? Similar to the most engaging thought experiments, it revealed wildly different perspectives and life encounters, highlighted chasms among genders, and was likely cause a deep personal dilemma if you thought on it extensively. Additionally, there came the predictable follow-up where men of a certain stripe came online to tell females how foolish they had been to select the bear and proceeded to limn the consequences they deserved for that choice. This at minimum enabled the women who had been hesitating about their decision to make it with renewed assurance.

Dramatising the Setup

The Bear-Cooking Tale effectively dramatises this clever small premise. This six-episode drama is adapted on Scandinavian writer Mikael Niemi’s 2018 book with the identical title (rendered in 2020 for English readers). It follows the tribulations of a clergyman (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his household as they come to begin a fresh religious post within Kengis, a remote village in Sweden’s north, during the mid-19th century. Within a community with few pleasures, none of the inhabitants particularly appreciate his puritanical approach to drinking and revelry, but it is his protection of the poor – especially the native Sami population, from among whom hails the preacher’s foster child the youth Jussi (the young actor) – and his belief in social justice and equal rights that places him in direct opposition against the Kengis local authorities.

The Opposing Forces

Quickly collaborating against him are the sheriff the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the fearsome factory proprietor the matron Sjödahl (the actress), observed initially dismissing a recently mangled laborer with a month’s pay while he is still gibbering upon seeing his crushed hand, and all others who profit from a populace easily swayed for a few bottles of the whisky provided by the creepy store owner Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). However, in fairness, Lindmark’s creepiness pales once travelling artist the artist Beronius arrives on the scene (Simon J Berger, delivering an acting turn of exceptional discomfiting power). While they remain – like the pastor himself – only a little more being stereotypes, they still serve as effective ones.

Narrative Development

Once the foundations of conflict sown, it is time to proceed to narrative business. The maid from the doctor’s house, Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), duly goes missing in the forest. Signs of her escape and animal scratches on a tree are found yet she remains nowhere to be seen. Rumours and anxieties of a man/maid-eating beast roaming the woodland spread, 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 peculiar show. It conjures a fine sense of the bleakness that allows suspicion and bias and grim legends flourish from the native legend that animals might be dominated or possessed by the spirits of humans. And it doesn’t romanticise the hardscrabble life experienced by the villagers, in which brutality, whether that of nature or people, lurks constantly on the edges, waiting to erupt. Yet the personas seldom evolve beyond symbols – or maybe, while the conflicts between justice and vengeance, rationality and religion, virtue and wickedness intensify, representative characters within a moral tale – preventing the whole thing fully becoming immersive.

Stylistic Shifts

And then, exist numerous tonally jarring moments in which the pastor’s ability in finding evidence and discern the maid’s destiny turns almost risible. He stands observing shattered containers and clumps of hair within storage sheds as a fusion of the Belgian detective the English sleuth – with Jussi a rather hapless Hastings-cum-Watson (none of whom were required to lick a blend of blood spatter and the boss’s spit to confirm that, yes, it was definitely coagulated blood at the crime scene), before announcing his latest deduction and pulling a body from a bog.

Clashing Agendas

The local leaders are bent on demonstrating that Hilda was killed by an animal, perhaps to protect the peace, perhaps to shield one of their own. The pastor is intent on establishing otherwise, and the evidence so quickly stacks up supporting his view that again the drama’s plausibility and the viewer’s patience get strained. At its best, the series evokes memories of the adaptation some years back of the author’s the serpent tale, with its evocation of the competing allures and fears offered by rational thought and religion. At its worst, it resembles a bear-themed police procedural. Nevertheless, it appears to offer the answer to the earlier query: “Ladies, take the bear.”

• The series is on Disney+ now.