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A heated discussion lately spread widely across online platforms, after someone posed the question to women: which would you prefer be lost in the woods with a man or with a bear? Similar to the best thought experiments, it revealed wildly different perspectives and life encounters, highlighted divides among genders, and was likely cause a deep personal dilemma for anyone pondering on it for too long. Additionally, there came the almost inevitable follow-up in which some males came online to tell women how foolish they had been for choosing the animal and proceeded to limn the punishments they deserved for it. This at minimum allowed the women who were uncertain over their choice to decide with a new confidence.

Dramatising the Setup

The Bear-Cooking Tale effectively brings to life this clever little setup. The six-part series is adapted from Scandinavian writer the novelist’s 2018 book with the identical title (rendered in 2020 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 in Kengis, an isolated settlement in Sweden’s north, during the mid-19th century. Within a community lacking many joys, none of the inhabitants especially warm to his strict stance on alcohol and dancing, yet it is his protection of impoverished people – particularly the indigenous Sami, from among whom comes the preacher’s adopted son the youth Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in social justice and equality that sets him on a collision course against the Kengis powers that be.

The Opposing Forces

Soon collaborating opposing him are the lawman the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the intimidating mill owner Madam Sjödahl (Pernilla August), seen initially firing a recently mangled worker with a month’s pay while he is still gibbering at the sight his crushed hand, and all others who profit from a community easily swayed with some containers of liquor sold by the creepy store owner Lindmark (the actor). However, in fairness, Lindmark’s creepiness diminishes when travelling artist the artist Beronius appears in the story (Simon J Berger, delivering a performance of rare discomfiting power). While they remain – like the pastor himself – only a little more being stereotypes, they still serve as potent archetypes.

Narrative Development

Once the foundations of conflict sown, the moment arrives to get down with the storyline. The maid employed by the doctor, Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), accordingly goes missing in the forest. Indications of her escape and animal scratches upon a trunk get discovered yet she remains nowhere to be seen. Gossip and anxieties of a man/maid-eating bear prowling the woods spread, yet the clergyman holds a different view which he and his ward embark to prove.

A Strange Creation

This Bear Drama is a slightly peculiar show. It conjures a strong impression of the desolation that lets suspicion and prejudice and grim legends thrive from the native legend that bears can be controlled or possessed by the souls of men. And it doesn’t idealising the tough existence experienced by the residents, where brutality, be it from the wild or people, always looms at the periphery, waiting to erupt. Yet the personas seldom evolve beyond symbols – or perhaps, while the conflicts amid fairness and vengeance, logic and religion, good and wickedness escalate, emblematic figures within a moral tale – which stops the entire production truly becoming immersive.

Tonal Inconsistencies

Additionally, exist the many stylistically clashing instances in which the pastor’s ability in finding evidence and discern the maid’s destiny turns almost risible. He stands observing broken milk pots and clumps of hair in hay barns like a combined the Belgian detective and Sherlock Holmes – alongside Jussi a rather hapless assistant figure (neither of whom had to taste a mixture of blood spatter and saliva from his superior to agree that, yes, it was definitely coagulated blood on the site), prior to declaring his newest conclusion and pulling a corpse from a bog.

Clashing Agendas

The local leaders are determined proving that the maid was killed by an animal, maybe to preserve the calm, perhaps to protect one of their own. The clergyman is intent on establishing otherwise, and the evidence so quickly accumulates in his favour that again the drama’s plausibility and audience tolerance are tested. In its finest moments, the series is reminiscent of the adaptation some years back of the author’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the competing attractions and fears offered by science and religion. In its low points, it resembles a bear-themed police procedural. Nevertheless, it does seem to provide the response to the earlier query: “Females, choose the animal.”

• To Cook a Bear streams on Disney+ now.