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An intense discussion lately spread widely across online platforms, after someone asked a query to women: would you rather find yourself stranded in the woods with a man or a bear? Like all the most engaging thought experiments, it exposed vastly opposing perspectives and experiences, illuminated divides between the sexes, and was likely cause a deep personal dilemma if you thought about it extensively. There was also the predictable coda in which men of a certain stripe took to the internet to inform women how stupid they had been for choosing the animal and went on to describe the punishments they deserved for that choice. This at least enabled the women who had been hesitating over their choice to make it with renewed assurance.

Dramatising the Scenario

The Bear-Cooking Tale skillfully dramatises this nifty little setup. This six-episode drama is based on Swedish author Mikael Niemi’s 2018 book of the same name (rendered two years later for an English audience). It follows the tribulations of a pastor (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his household when they arrive to start a new ministry in Kengis, an isolated settlement in northern Sweden, during the mid-19th century. Within a community with few pleasures, none of the locals particularly warm to his strict approach to drinking and dancing, but it is his protection of the poor – especially the indigenous Sami, from which comes the preacher’s foster child the youth Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his conviction in social justice and equality that sets him on a collision course with the Kengis powers that be.

The Opposing Forces

Soon collaborating against him are the lawman Brahe (the performer), the intimidating factory proprietor the matron Sjödahl (Pernilla August), observed early on dismissing a recently mangled laborer with minimal compensation as he remains gibbering at the sight his crushed hand, and all others who benefit from a community who can be bought for a few bottles of the whisky sold by the creepy shopkeeper the merchant Lindmark (the actor). However, in fairness, Lindmark’s creepiness diminishes when itinerant painter the artist Beronius arrives in the story (Simon J Berger, providing an acting turn of exceptional discomfiting power). If they are – like the pastor himself – just slightly beyond than caricatures, they are at least effective ones.

Plot Progression

Once the foundations of conflict planted, the moment arrives to get down to narrative business. The servant employed by the doctor, Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), duly vanishes in the forest. Signs of her flight and animal scratches upon a trunk are found but she is completely absent. Rumours and fears of a man/maid-eating beast roaming the woodland spread, but the pastor holds a different view that he and Jussi set out to prove.

A Strange Creation

To Cook a Bear is a slightly odd beast. It conjures a strong impression of the desolation that allows suspicion and prejudice and grim legends thrive from the native legend that animals might be dominated or inhabited by the spirits of men. And it doesn’t idealising the tough existence experienced by the villagers, where violence, whether that of nature or people, always looms at the periphery, poised to explode. Yet the personas seldom evolve beyond symbols – or maybe, while the conflicts amid fairness and revenge, rationality and religion, virtue and wickedness intensify, emblematic figures within a moral tale – preventing the entire production truly coming to life.

Stylistic Shifts

Additionally, there are the many tonally jarring moments in which the pastor’s ability in finding evidence and discern the maid’s destiny becomes nearly laughable. He stands observing shattered containers and clumps of hair in hay barns like a combined 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 saliva from his superior to agree that indeed, it was clearly dried blood at the crime scene), prior to declaring his latest deduction and extracting a body from a bog.

Opposing Goals

The local leaders are determined proving that Hilda was killed by a bear, maybe to protect the peace, perhaps to shield a fellow elite. The clergyman is bent on establishing the opposite, and the proof so quickly accumulates in his favour that once more the show’s credibility and audience tolerance are tested. At its best, To Cook a Bear evokes memories of the TV version a few years ago of Sarah Perry’s the serpent tale, with its evocation of the competing attractions and terrors offered by science and religion. In its low points, it resembles Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Still, it appears to offer the answer to the earlier query: “Females, choose the animal.”

• The series streams on Disney+ now.