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An intense debate lately went viral across online platforms, following someone asked the question to women: which would you prefer be lost in the woods with a man or with a bear? Like all the best hypothetical scenarios, it revealed wildly different perspectives and life encounters, illuminated divides among genders, and was likely cause an existential crisis if you thought on it for too long. There was also the almost inevitable follow-up in which some males came online to tell females how stupid they were to select the animal and went on to describe the punishments they deserved for that choice. This at least enabled those females who had been hesitating about their decision to decide with renewed assurance.

Portraying the Scenario

The Bear-Cooking Tale effectively brings to life this nifty little setup. This six-episode drama is adapted from Swedish author the novelist’s 2018 book with the identical title (rendered two years later for English readers). It follows the tribulations of a pastor (the lead actor) and his household as they come to start a fresh religious post within Kengis, an isolated village in northern Sweden, in 1852. In a place with few pleasures, none of the inhabitants particularly warm to his strict stance on alcohol and dancing, but it is his defense of the poor – especially 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 equality that places him in direct opposition against the Kengis powers that be.

The Opposing Forces

Soon collaborating against him include the lawman Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the fearsome mill owner Madam Sjödahl (Pernilla August), observed early on dismissing a recently mangled laborer with a month’s pay while he is still babbling at the sight his crushed hand, and all others who profit from a community who can be bought for a few bottles of the whisky provided by the unsettling store owner Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). However, in fairness, Lindmark’s eeriness diminishes once travelling artist the artist Beronius arrives in the story (the performer, delivering a performance of rare unsettling intensity). If they are – like the pastor himself – just slightly beyond than caricatures, they are at least effective ones.

Narrative Development

With the seeds of tension sown, it is time to get down to narrative business. The servant employed by the doctor, Hilda (the actress), accordingly vanishes in the forest. Indications of her escape and bear markings on a tree are found but she is completely absent. Rumours and anxieties of a man/maid-eating beast roaming the woods circulate, but the pastor holds a different view which he and his ward embark to prove.

A Strange Creation

To Cook a Bear is a slightly peculiar show. It conjures a fine sense of the desolation that lets suspicion and bias and dark myths flourish from the native legend that animals can be controlled or inhabited by the spirits of men. It avoids romanticise the hardscrabble life experienced by the villagers, where violence, whether that of nature or mankind, lurks constantly at the periphery, waiting to erupt. Yet the personas rarely become more than ciphers – or perhaps, as the struggles amid fairness and revenge, logic and faith, good and evil intensify, representative characters in a fable – preventing the entire production fully coming to life.

Tonal Inconsistencies

And then, there are the many stylistically clashing moments where the clergyman’s skill in finding evidence and discern the maid’s destiny turns almost risible. He stands looking at shattered containers and strands of fur in hay barns as a fusion of the Belgian detective the English sleuth – with Jussi a rather hapless assistant figure (none of whom had to lick a blend of blood droplets and the boss’s spit to agree that indeed, it was definitely coagulated blood on the site), before announcing his newest conclusion and extracting a body out of a swamp.

Clashing Agendas

The village elite are bent on demonstrating that Hilda met her end by an animal, maybe to protect the calm, perhaps to shield one of their own. The pastor is bent on proving the opposite, and the evidence so quickly accumulates in his favour that again the show’s credibility and the viewer’s patience are tested. At its best, the series evokes memories of the TV version a few years ago of the author’s the serpent tale, with its evocation of the competing attractions and fears presented by science and belief. In its low points, it’s more like a bear-themed police procedural. Nevertheless, it appears to provide the response to that debated question: “Females, choose the animal.”

• The series streams on Disney+ currently.