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An intense debate recently went viral across online platforms, after someone posed a query for females: which would you prefer find yourself stranded in the woods alongside a male or with a bear? Like all the most engaging hypothetical scenarios, it exposed wildly different worldviews and experiences, highlighted chasms between the sexes, and could easily cause a deep personal dilemma if you thought on it for too long. There was also the predictable follow-up where men of a certain stripe came online to tell females how foolish they had been for choosing the bear and went on to describe the punishments they deserved for it. This at least allowed the women who were uncertain over their choice to decide with renewed assurance.

Portraying the Setup

The Bear-Cooking Tale skillfully brings to life this nifty little setup. This six-episode drama is adapted on Swedish author the novelist’s 2018 novel with the identical title (translated in 2020 for English readers). It traces the tribulations of a pastor (the lead actor) and his family as they come to begin a fresh religious post within Kengis, a remote village in northern Sweden, in 1852. Within a community lacking many joys, not one of the locals particularly warm to his strict stance on drinking and revelry, but it is his defense of impoverished people – especially the indigenous Sami, from among whom comes the preacher’s foster child the youth Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in societal fairness and equal rights that sets him in direct opposition against the Kengis powers that be.

The Antagonists

Quickly in cahoots against him are the sheriff the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the intimidating mill owner Madam Sjödahl (the actress), observed initially dismissing a newly injured laborer with minimal compensation as he remains babbling upon seeing of his pulped hand, and anyone else who benefit from a populace easily swayed for a few bottles of the whisky sold by the creepy shopkeeper the merchant Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). However, in fairness, Lindmark’s creepiness diminishes when travelling artist Beronius arrives in the story (the performer, providing an acting turn of rare discomfiting power). While they remain – like the pastor himself – just slightly beyond being stereotypes, they still serve as potent archetypes.

Narrative Development

With the seeds of conflict planted, it is time to proceed with the storyline. The servant employed by the doctor, Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), accordingly goes missing from the woods. Signs of her flight and bear markings upon a trunk get discovered but she is nowhere to be seen. Gossip and fears of a man/maid-eating bear roaming the woodland circulate, but the pastor holds a different view that he and Jussi set out to prove.

An Odd Beast

This Bear Drama is a somewhat odd beast. It conjures a fine sense of the bleakness that lets suspicion and bias and grim legends flourish from the native legend that animals might be dominated or inhabited by the spirits of men. It avoids idealising the tough existence led by the villagers, where brutality, whether that of nature or mankind, lurks constantly on the edges, waiting to erupt. Yet the personas rarely become more than ciphers – or perhaps, as the struggles between justice and revenge, logic and religion, good and wickedness escalate, emblematic figures in a fable – preventing the whole thing truly becoming immersive.

Stylistic Shifts

And then, there are numerous stylistically clashing moments in which the clergyman’s skill to discover clues and determine Hilda’s fate turns nearly laughable. He positions himself observing broken milk pots and strands of fur within storage sheds as a fusion of Hercule Poirot and Sherlock Holmes – alongside Jussi a rather hapless assistant figure (neither of whom were required to taste a mixture of blood spatter and saliva from his superior to agree that, yes, it was definitely dried blood at the crime scene), before announcing his latest deduction and pulling a body from a bog.

Clashing Agendas

The local leaders are determined demonstrating that Hilda was killed by an animal, perhaps to protect the calm, or possibly to protect a fellow elite. The pastor is bent on establishing the opposite, and the evidence so quickly stacks up supporting his view that again the show’s credibility and the viewer’s patience are tested. In its finest moments, To Cook a Bear evokes memories of the adaptation a few years ago of the author’s the serpent tale, through its portrayal of the competing allures and terrors offered by rational thought and belief. At its worst, it resembles a bear-themed police procedural. Nevertheless, it does seem to offer the answer to the earlier query: “Ladies, take the bear.”

• To Cook a Bear streams on Disney+ currently.