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A intense discussion lately spread widely across online platforms, following a user asked the question to women: would you rather find yourself stranded in a forest with a man or with a bear? Similar to the most engaging thought experiments, it revealed wildly different perspectives and experiences, highlighted chasms between the sexes, and could easily to induce a deep personal dilemma if you thought on it for too long. There was also the predictable follow-up in which men of a certain stripe took to the internet to tell females how foolish they were to select the bear and went on to describe the consequences they merited for that choice. This at minimum enabled those females who had been hesitating about their decision to make it with renewed assurance.

Dramatising the Setup

The Bear-Cooking Tale effectively dramatises this nifty little setup. This six-episode series is based on Swedish author Mikael Niemi’s 2018 novel of the same name (translated in 2020 for an English audience). It follows the tribulations of a clergyman (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his family when they arrive to start a fresh religious post in Kengis, a remote settlement in northern Sweden, in 1852. In a place with few pleasures, not one of the inhabitants particularly warm to his puritanical approach to drinking and revelry, but it is his defense of impoverished people – particularly the indigenous Sami, from among whom hails the preacher’s adopted son Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in societal fairness and equal rights that places him in direct opposition against the Kengis local authorities.

The Opposing Forces

Soon collaborating against him are the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the intimidating mill owner the matron Sjödahl (the actress), observed early on firing a recently mangled laborer with minimal compensation while he is still gibbering at the sight of his pulped hand, and anyone else who profit from a community who can be bought for a few bottles of the whisky provided by the creepy store owner Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). Although, in fairness, Lindmark’s creepiness diminishes once itinerant painter the artist Beronius appears on the scene (Simon J Berger, delivering a performance of exceptional unsettling intensity). While they remain – like the pastor himself – just slightly beyond than caricatures, they still serve as effective ones.

Narrative Development

With the seeds of conflict planted, it is time to proceed with the storyline. The maid from the doctor’s house, the character Hilda (the actress), duly vanishes in the forest. Indications of her escape and bear markings on a tree are found yet she remains nowhere to be seen. Rumours and fears regarding a human-devouring beast prowling the woods spread, yet the clergyman holds a different view that he and Jussi set out to verify.

A Strange Creation

This Bear Drama is a slightly odd beast. It conjures a fine sense of the bleakness that allows distrust and bias and grim legends flourish from the native legend that bears can be controlled or possessed by the souls of humans. It avoids idealising the tough existence experienced by the residents, in which brutality, be it from the wild or people, lurks constantly on the edges, poised to explode. Yet the personas seldom evolve beyond symbols – or perhaps, while the conflicts amid fairness and vengeance, rationality and religion, virtue and wickedness escalate, emblematic figures within a moral tale – preventing the whole thing truly becoming immersive.

Stylistic Shifts

And then, there are numerous stylistically clashing instances in which the pastor’s ability to discover clues and determine the maid’s destiny becomes almost risible. He stands looking at broken milk pots and clumps of hair within storage sheds like a combined the Belgian detective the English sleuth – alongside Jussi a rather hapless Hastings-cum-Watson (neither of whom had to lick a mixture of blood droplets and the boss’s spit to confirm that indeed, it was clearly coagulated blood on the site), before announcing his latest deduction and pulling a body out of a swamp.

Clashing Agendas

The village elite are determined proving that the maid met her end by an animal, maybe to preserve the calm, perhaps to protect one of their own. The clergyman is intent on establishing the opposite, and the proof 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 is reminiscent of the TV version a few years ago of Sarah Perry’s the serpent tale, with its evocation of the competing attractions and fears offered by science and belief. In its low points, it resembles Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Still, it does seem to provide the answer to that debated question: “Females, choose the animal.”

• To Cook a Bear is on Disney+ currently.