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An intense debate lately went viral across online platforms, after someone posed the question to women: would you rather find yourself stranded in the woods alongside a male or a bear? Similar to the most engaging hypothetical scenarios, it exposed vastly opposing worldviews and life encounters, illuminated chasms between the sexes, and was likely to induce a deep personal dilemma for anyone pondering on it extensively. Additionally, there came the predictable coda where men of a certain stripe came online to tell females how stupid they were for choosing the animal and went on to limn the punishments they merited for it. This at least allowed those females who had been hesitating about their decision to make it with renewed assurance.

Dramatising the Scenario

The Bear-Cooking Tale skillfully brings to life this nifty small premise. This six-episode drama is based from Swedish author Mikael Niemi’s 2018 novel with the identical title (translated two years later for an English audience). It traces the tribulations of a pastor (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his household when they arrive to begin a fresh religious post within Kengis, a remote settlement in Sweden’s north, in 1852. In a place lacking many joys, not one of the inhabitants particularly warm to his puritanical approach to drinking and revelry, but it is his defense of the poor – especially the native Sami population, from among whom comes the pastor’s foster child the youth Jussi (the young actor) – and his belief in societal fairness and equality that sets him in direct opposition against the Kengis powers that be.

The Opposing Forces

Soon in cahoots against him include the lawman the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the fearsome mill owner the matron Sjödahl (the actress), observed early on dismissing a newly injured laborer with minimal compensation as he remains gibbering upon seeing of his pulped hand, and all others who profit from a populace easily swayed for a few bottles of liquor provided by the creepy store owner the merchant Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). However, in fairness, Lindmark’s creepiness pales when travelling artist Beronius arrives in the story (the performer, providing an acting turn of exceptional discomfiting power). While they remain – similar to the clergyman – just slightly beyond than caricatures, they are at least potent archetypes.

Narrative Development

With the seeds of conflict sown, the moment arrives to proceed with the storyline. The servant employed by the doctor, Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), accordingly vanishes in the forest. Signs of her escape and animal scratches on a tree are found but she is nowhere to be seen. Rumours and anxieties regarding a human-devouring bear roaming the woodland spread, but the pastor holds a different view which he and his ward embark to verify.

An Odd Beast

This Bear Drama is a slightly peculiar show. It conjures a fine sense of the desolation that lets distrust and bias and grim legends flourish based on local folklore that bears can be controlled or inhabited by the spirits of humans. It avoids idealising the hardscrabble life led by the villagers, in which brutality, whether that of nature or mankind, always looms on the edges, waiting to erupt. But the characters seldom evolve beyond symbols – or maybe, as the struggles between justice and revenge, logic and faith, good and evil intensify, representative characters within a moral tale – which stops the entire production fully becoming immersive.

Stylistic Shifts

Additionally, exist numerous tonally jarring instances where the pastor’s ability to discover clues and discern the maid’s destiny turns nearly laughable. He stands observing shattered containers and strands of fur in hay barns like a combined Hercule Poirot the English sleuth – alongside Jussi a particularly unfortunate assistant figure (none of whom were required to taste a blend of blood droplets and saliva from his superior to agree that, yes, it was definitely dried blood at the crime scene), before announcing his latest deduction and extracting a body from a bog.

Clashing Agendas

The local leaders are bent on proving that Hilda was killed by an animal, maybe to preserve the peace, perhaps to shield one of their own. The clergyman is intent on proving otherwise, and the evidence so quickly stacks up in his favour that once more the drama’s plausibility and the viewer’s patience are tested. At its best, To Cook a Bear evokes memories of the TV version some years back of Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the opposing allures and terrors offered by science and religion. In its low points, it resembles a bear-themed police procedural. Still, it does seem to offer the response to that debated question: “Ladies, take the bear.”

• The series is on Disney+ now.