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A intense debate lately spread widely across online platforms, after a user posed the question to women: would you rather be lost in the woods alongside a male or with a bear? Like all the most engaging hypothetical scenarios, it revealed vastly opposing perspectives and life encounters, highlighted chasms among genders, and could easily cause a deep personal dilemma for anyone pondering on it for too long. There was also the almost inevitable coda where men of a certain stripe came online to inform females how foolish they were for choosing the animal and went on to limn the consequences they deserved for that choice. This at minimum enabled those females who were uncertain over their choice to make it with renewed assurance.

Dramatising the Setup

The Bear-Cooking Tale skillfully dramatises this clever small premise. This six-episode drama is adapted from Swedish author the novelist’s 2018 book with the identical title (translated in 2020 for English readers). It follows the struggles of a clergyman (the lead actor) and his household as they come to start a fresh religious post in Kengis, an isolated settlement in northern Sweden, during the mid-19th century. Within a community lacking many joys, none of the inhabitants particularly warm to his strict stance on alcohol and dancing, yet it is his protection of impoverished people – particularly the indigenous Sami, from which hails the pastor’s foster child the youth Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his conviction in social justice and equal rights that places him on a collision course against the Kengis powers that be.

The Opposing Forces

Quickly in cahoots opposing him are the sheriff the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the intimidating mill owner the matron Sjödahl (Pernilla August), seen initially firing a recently mangled worker with a month’s pay while he is still babbling upon seeing of his pulped hand, and all others who profit from a community easily swayed for a few bottles of liquor provided by the creepy shopkeeper Lindmark (the actor). However, in fairness, Lindmark’s creepiness pales when travelling artist the artist Beronius arrives in the story (Simon J Berger, delivering an acting turn of exceptional unsettling intensity). If they are – similar to the clergyman – just slightly beyond than caricatures, they still serve as effective ones.

Narrative Development

With the seeds of tension planted, it is time to get down to narrative business. The maid from the doctor’s house, Hilda (the actress), duly vanishes from the woods. Signs of her flight and bear markings upon a trunk are found yet she remains completely absent. Rumours and fears of a man/maid-eating beast roaming the woods circulate, yet the clergyman holds a different view which he and his ward embark to verify.

A Strange Creation

This Bear Drama is a slightly peculiar show. It conjures a strong impression of the bleakness that lets distrust and prejudice and dark myths thrive from the native legend that animals might be dominated or possessed by the souls of humans. It avoids romanticise the hardscrabble life experienced by the villagers, in which brutality, whether that of nature or people, always looms at the periphery, waiting to erupt. But the characters seldom evolve more than ciphers – or perhaps, as the struggles amid fairness and vengeance, logic and faith, virtue and wickedness intensify, representative characters within a moral tale – preventing the whole thing fully becoming immersive.

Tonal Inconsistencies

Additionally, exist numerous stylistically clashing instances in which the pastor’s ability in finding evidence and determine Hilda’s fate becomes nearly laughable. He positions himself observing shattered containers and strands of fur within storage sheds like a combined Hercule Poirot the English sleuth – with Jussi a particularly unfortunate assistant figure (none of whom were required to lick a mixture of blood spatter and saliva from his superior to agree that, yes, it was clearly coagulated blood at the crime scene), prior to declaring his latest deduction and pulling a body from a bog.

Clashing Agendas

The village elite are determined proving that the maid met her end by an animal, perhaps to protect the calm, perhaps to protect a fellow elite. The clergyman is intent on proving the opposite, and the evidence so rapidly stacks up supporting his view that again the drama’s plausibility and the viewer’s patience get strained. In its finest moments, To Cook a Bear evokes memories of the TV version a few years ago of Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the competing attractions and terrors presented by science and belief. At its worst, it’s more like Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Nevertheless, it appears to provide the response to that debated question: “Females, choose the animal.”

• To Cook a Bear is on Disney+ currently.