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An heated debate lately went viral on social media, after someone asked a query for females: would you rather be lost in a forest alongside a male or with a bear? Similar to the best hypothetical scenarios, it exposed wildly different perspectives and life encounters, illuminated divides between the sexes, and was likely cause an existential crisis for anyone pondering on it extensively. There was also the almost inevitable coda in which men of a certain stripe came online to inform females how foolish they had been to select the bear and proceeded to describe the punishments they merited for it. This at least enabled the women who had been hesitating about their decision to decide with a new confidence.

Dramatising the Scenario

The Bear-Cooking Tale skillfully dramatises this nifty small premise. The six-part drama is based on Swedish author Mikael Niemi’s 2018 novel with the identical title (rendered in 2020 for an English audience). It traces the struggles of a clergyman (the lead actor) and his household when they arrive to begin a fresh religious post within Kengis, a remote village in northern Sweden, in 1852. In a place with few pleasures, not one of the inhabitants particularly appreciate his puritanical stance on alcohol and revelry, yet it is his defense of impoverished people – especially the indigenous Sami, from which comes the pastor’s foster child Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his conviction in societal fairness and equality that places him on a collision course with the Kengis powers that be.

The Antagonists

Soon collaborating opposing him are the lawman the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the intimidating mill owner the matron Sjödahl (the actress), observed early on firing a recently mangled laborer with a month’s pay while he is still babbling upon seeing of his pulped hand, and anyone else who benefit from a populace easily swayed for a few bottles of liquor provided by the creepy store owner the merchant Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). However, in fairness, Lindmark’s eeriness pales once itinerant painter the artist Beronius arrives on the scene (Simon J Berger, providing an acting turn of exceptional unsettling intensity). If they are – like the pastor himself – just slightly beyond than caricatures, they are at least effective ones.

Narrative Development

Once the foundations of conflict sown, the moment arrives to proceed to narrative business. The servant from the doctor’s house, the character Hilda (the actress), accordingly goes missing in the forest. Signs of her escape and bear markings on a tree get discovered yet she remains completely absent. Gossip and anxieties regarding a human-devouring beast roaming the woods circulate, yet the clergyman has another theory that he and Jussi set out to prove.

An Odd Beast

To Cook a Bear is a slightly odd beast. It creates a strong impression of the desolation that allows suspicion and bias and grim legends flourish from the native legend that bears might be dominated or possessed by the souls of men. And it doesn’t romanticise the hardscrabble life experienced by the villagers, in which brutality, whether that of the wild or mankind, always looms on the edges, waiting to erupt. Yet the personas rarely become more than ciphers – or maybe, as the struggles amid fairness and vengeance, rationality and faith, virtue and wickedness intensify, representative characters within a moral tale – preventing the whole thing truly coming to life.

Tonal Inconsistencies

And then, exist numerous stylistically clashing moments in which the clergyman’s skill to discover clues and determine the maid’s destiny turns almost risible. He stands looking at shattered containers and clumps of hair in hay barns like a combined Hercule Poirot and Sherlock Holmes – alongside Jussi a particularly unfortunate assistant figure (none of whom had to lick a mixture of blood spatter and saliva from his superior to confirm that indeed, it was clearly dried blood at the crime scene), before announcing his newest conclusion and pulling a corpse from a bog.

Opposing Goals

The local leaders are bent on demonstrating that the maid met her end by an animal, maybe to protect the calm, perhaps to shield a fellow elite. The clergyman is bent on establishing the opposite, and the evidence so quickly accumulates in his favour that once more the show’s credibility and audience tolerance are tested. In its finest moments, the series is reminiscent of the adaptation a few years ago of Sarah Perry’s the serpent tale, with its evocation of the competing attractions and fears presented by science and religion. At its worst, it resembles a bear-themed police procedural. Nevertheless, it appears to offer the answer to the earlier query: “Females, choose the animal.”

• To Cook a Bear is on Disney+ now.