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An heated discussion recently went viral across online platforms, after a user asked the question for females: would you rather find yourself stranded in a forest alongside a male or a bear? Like all the most engaging thought experiments, it exposed vastly opposing perspectives and life encounters, highlighted chasms between the sexes, and was likely to induce an existential crisis if you thought about it extensively. Additionally, there came the predictable coda where men of a certain stripe came online to inform females how foolish they had been for choosing the animal and proceeded to limn the punishments they merited for that choice. This at minimum allowed the women who were uncertain about their decision to make it with a new confidence.

Portraying the Scenario

The Bear-Cooking Tale skillfully brings to life this nifty little setup. This six-episode drama is adapted from Swedish author Mikael Niemi’s 2018 novel of the same name (rendered two years later for English readers). It traces the tribulations of a clergyman (the lead actor) and his household as they come to begin a fresh religious post within Kengis, a remote village in northern Sweden, during the mid-19th century. Within a community lacking many joys, none of the locals especially warm to his puritanical stance on drinking and revelry, but it is his protection of the poor – especially the indigenous Sami, from which comes the preacher’s adopted son the youth Jussi (the young actor) – and his conviction in social justice and equal rights that places him in direct opposition against the Kengis powers that be.

The Antagonists

Soon collaborating against him are the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the fearsome mill owner Madam Sjödahl (Pernilla August), observed early on firing a newly injured worker with a month’s pay as he remains babbling upon seeing of his pulped hand, and anyone else who benefit from a community who can be bought for a few bottles of liquor sold by the unsettling store owner the merchant Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s eeriness diminishes when itinerant painter Beronius arrives in the story (Simon J Berger, delivering a performance of rare unsettling intensity). While they remain – like the pastor himself – just slightly beyond than caricatures, they are at least potent archetypes.

Narrative Development

With the seeds of conflict sown, the moment arrives to get down to narrative business. The maid from the doctor’s house, the character Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), duly vanishes from the woods. Signs of her flight and animal scratches upon a trunk are found but she is completely absent. Gossip and fears regarding a human-devouring beast prowling the woodland spread, yet the clergyman holds a different view that he and Jussi embark to verify.

An Odd Beast

This Bear Drama is a slightly peculiar show. It creates a fine sense of the bleakness that lets suspicion and bias and dark myths thrive based on local folklore that animals might be dominated or inhabited by the souls of men. It avoids romanticise the tough existence experienced by the villagers, where violence, be it from the wild or mankind, always looms at the periphery, poised to explode. But the characters rarely become beyond symbols – or perhaps, while the conflicts between justice and revenge, rationality and faith, good and evil intensify, emblematic figures in a fable – which stops the whole thing fully coming to life.

Tonal Inconsistencies

And then, exist numerous stylistically clashing instances in which the clergyman’s skill to discover clues and determine Hilda’s fate turns nearly laughable. He stands observing broken milk pots and strands of fur in hay barns as a fusion of the Belgian detective the English sleuth – alongside Jussi a rather hapless Hastings-cum-Watson (neither of whom had to taste a blend of blood spatter and the boss’s spit to agree that indeed, it was clearly dried blood at the crime scene), before announcing his latest deduction and pulling a body out of a swamp.

Opposing Goals

The local leaders are bent on demonstrating that the maid was killed by a bear, perhaps to preserve the calm, perhaps to shield one of their own. The pastor is intent on proving the opposite, and the evidence so quickly stacks up in his favour that again the drama’s plausibility and the viewer’s patience are tested. At its best, To Cook a Bear evokes memories of the TV version a few years ago of the author’s The Essex Serpent, through its portrayal of the competing allures and fears offered by science and religion. At its worst, it resembles Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Nevertheless, it appears to provide the answer to the earlier query: “Females, choose the animal.”

• To Cook a Bear streams on Disney+ currently.