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A heated debate lately went viral across online platforms, after someone posed the question for females: would you rather be lost in the woods alongside a male or with a bear? Like all the most engaging thought experiments, it revealed vastly opposing worldviews and life encounters, highlighted divides between the sexes, and was likely cause a deep personal dilemma if you thought on it for too long. There was also the predictable coda in which men of a certain stripe came online to inform females how foolish they had been for choosing the bear and went on to limn the punishments they merited for that choice. This at least enabled those females who had been hesitating about their decision to decide with renewed assurance.

Dramatising the Setup

The Bear-Cooking Tale effectively dramatises this clever little setup. This six-episode series is based from Scandinavian writer Mikael Niemi’s 2018 book of the same name (rendered in 2020 for an English audience). It traces the tribulations of a clergyman (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his household when they arrive to begin a new ministry within Kengis, a remote settlement in northern Sweden, in 1852. In a place lacking many joys, none of the inhabitants especially warm to his puritanical approach to drinking and dancing, but it is his protection of the poor – particularly the native Sami population, from which hails 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 with the Kengis local authorities.

The Opposing Forces

Quickly collaborating opposing him include the lawman Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the fearsome mill owner Madam Sjödahl (the actress), seen initially firing a newly injured worker with a month’s pay as he remains gibbering upon seeing of his pulped hand, and anyone else who benefit from a community who can be bought with some containers of the whisky sold by the unsettling store owner Lindmark (the actor). Although, to be fair, Lindmark’s eeriness diminishes when travelling artist the artist Beronius appears on the scene (Simon J Berger, delivering a performance of exceptional discomfiting power). If they are – similar to the clergyman – just slightly beyond being stereotypes, they are at least potent archetypes.

Narrative Development

With the seeds of tension planted, it is time to get down to narrative business. The servant from the doctor’s house, the character Hilda (the actress), duly goes missing from the woods. Indications of her escape and animal scratches on a tree get discovered but she is completely absent. Rumours and anxieties regarding a human-devouring beast prowling the woods circulate, but the pastor holds a different view which he and his ward set out to verify.

A Strange Creation

This Bear Drama is a slightly odd beast. It conjures a strong impression of the desolation that allows distrust and prejudice and grim legends flourish from the native legend that animals might be dominated or possessed by the spirits of men. It avoids romanticise the hardscrabble life led by the villagers, in which violence, whether that of the wild or people, always looms at the periphery, waiting to erupt. But the characters rarely become beyond symbols – or maybe, while the conflicts between justice and vengeance, logic and religion, virtue and wickedness intensify, emblematic figures within a moral tale – preventing the whole thing fully becoming immersive.

Stylistic Shifts

Additionally, there are numerous stylistically clashing moments where the pastor’s ability to discover clues and discern the maid’s destiny turns nearly laughable. He positions himself observing broken milk pots and clumps of hair within storage sheds like a combined Hercule Poirot and Sherlock Holmes – alongside Jussi a rather hapless Hastings-cum-Watson (neither of whom were required to lick a blend of blood droplets and saliva from his superior to confirm that indeed, it was clearly coagulated blood on the site), prior to declaring his latest deduction and pulling a corpse out of a swamp.

Clashing Agendas

The village elite are determined proving that Hilda was killed by an animal, maybe to protect the peace, or possibly to protect a fellow elite. The pastor is intent on establishing the opposite, and the proof so quickly stacks up supporting his view that once more the drama’s plausibility and the viewer’s patience get strained. In its finest moments, To Cook a Bear is reminiscent of the TV version some years back of Sarah Perry’s the serpent tale, with its evocation of the competing attractions and fears offered by science and belief. At its worst, it resembles Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Still, it appears to provide the response to that debated question: “Ladies, take the bear.”

• The series streams on Disney+ currently.