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An heated debate recently spread widely across online platforms, after someone asked the question for females: which would you prefer be lost in a forest alongside a male or a bear? Like all the most engaging hypothetical scenarios, it exposed vastly opposing worldviews and life encounters, illuminated chasms between the sexes, and was likely to induce an existential crisis for anyone pondering about it extensively. Additionally, there came the almost inevitable follow-up where some males came online to tell women how foolish they were for choosing the animal and proceeded to describe the punishments they merited for it. This at minimum allowed the women who were uncertain about their decision to decide with a new confidence.

Portraying the Setup

The Bear-Cooking Tale effectively dramatises this clever small premise. This six-episode drama is based on Swedish author Mikael Niemi’s 2018 book with the identical title (rendered in 2020 for an English audience). It follows the tribulations of a pastor (the lead actor) and his family as they come to begin a new ministry in Kengis, an isolated village in Sweden’s north, during the mid-19th century. Within a community lacking many joys, none of the locals particularly appreciate his strict stance on drinking and revelry, yet it is his defense of the poor – particularly the native Sami population, from which hails the preacher’s adopted son the youth Jussi (the young actor) – and his belief in societal fairness and equal rights that places him in direct opposition against the Kengis local authorities.

The Antagonists

Quickly in cahoots opposing him include the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the intimidating mill owner Madam Sjödahl (Pernilla August), observed initially dismissing a newly injured laborer with a month’s pay while he is still babbling upon seeing of his pulped hand, and anyone else who benefit from a community who can be bought with some containers of the whisky provided by the unsettling store owner the merchant Lindmark (the actor). Although, to be fair, Lindmark’s creepiness diminishes when travelling artist the artist Beronius appears in the story (the performer, providing an acting turn of exceptional unsettling intensity). If they are – like the pastor himself – just slightly beyond than caricatures, they still serve as potent archetypes.

Narrative Development

Once the foundations of conflict sown, the moment arrives to proceed to narrative business. The maid from the doctor’s house, Hilda (the actress), duly goes missing from the woods. Indications of her escape and animal scratches upon a trunk are found but she is nowhere to be seen. Gossip and anxieties of a man/maid-eating beast prowling the woodland circulate, yet the clergyman holds a different view that he and Jussi embark to prove.

A Strange Creation

To Cook a Bear is a slightly odd beast. It creates a fine sense of the bleakness that allows distrust and prejudice and grim legends flourish from the native legend that animals can be controlled or possessed by the souls of humans. And it doesn’t idealising the tough existence led by the villagers, where violence, be it from nature or people, always looms at the periphery, waiting to erupt. Yet the personas rarely become beyond symbols – or perhaps, as the struggles between justice and revenge, rationality and faith, virtue and evil escalate, emblematic figures in a fable – preventing the entire production truly coming to life.

Stylistic Shifts

And then, there are the many tonally jarring moments in which the clergyman’s skill in finding evidence and determine the maid’s destiny turns almost risible. He positions himself observing shattered containers and clumps of hair within storage sheds as a fusion of Hercule Poirot the English sleuth – alongside Jussi a particularly unfortunate assistant figure (neither of whom had to taste a blend of blood spatter and the boss’s spit to confirm that, yes, it was definitely coagulated blood on the site), before announcing his newest conclusion and pulling a body out of a swamp.

Opposing Goals

The local leaders are bent on demonstrating that the maid was killed by an animal, perhaps to preserve the calm, perhaps to shield a fellow elite. The clergyman is bent on proving the opposite, and the evidence so quickly stacks up in his favour that once more the drama’s plausibility and audience tolerance get strained. At its best, the series evokes memories of the adaptation some years back of Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, through its portrayal of the opposing attractions and terrors presented by science and belief. At its worst, it resembles Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Still, it appears to provide the answer to that debated question: “Ladies, take the bear.”

• The series is on Disney+ currently.