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A intense discussion recently spread widely on social media, following someone posed a query for females: which would you prefer find yourself stranded in the woods with a man or with a bear? Similar to the best thought experiments, it exposed wildly different perspectives and life encounters, illuminated chasms between the sexes, and was likely to induce an existential crisis for anyone pondering on it extensively. There was also the predictable coda where some males took to the internet to tell females how foolish they had been to select the bear and went on to describe the consequences they merited for it. This at least enabled the women who were uncertain about their decision to make it with renewed assurance.

Dramatising the Scenario

The Bear-Cooking Tale skillfully dramatises this clever small premise. This six-episode drama is adapted on Swedish author the novelist’s 2018 novel with the identical title (rendered two years later for an English audience). It follows the tribulations of a clergyman (the lead actor) and his family as they come to start a fresh religious post within Kengis, an isolated village in Sweden’s north, in 1852. Within a community lacking many joys, none of the locals especially appreciate his strict stance on drinking and revelry, yet it is his protection 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 social justice and equal rights that sets him in direct opposition with the Kengis local authorities.

The Antagonists

Quickly collaborating against him include the lawman Brahe (the performer), the fearsome mill owner the matron Sjödahl (the actress), observed early on dismissing a newly injured worker with minimal compensation while he is still babbling upon seeing his crushed hand, and all others who benefit from a populace who can be bought with some containers of liquor provided by the creepy store owner Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). However, in fairness, Lindmark’s eeriness pales when itinerant painter the artist Beronius arrives on the scene (Simon J Berger, delivering an acting turn of rare 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 with the storyline. The servant employed by the doctor, the character Hilda (the actress), duly vanishes from the woods. Indications of her flight and bear markings upon a trunk are found yet she remains nowhere to be seen. Rumours and anxieties regarding a human-devouring bear prowling the woods spread, but the pastor has another theory that he and Jussi set out to prove.

An Odd Beast

To Cook a Bear is a slightly odd beast. It conjures a fine sense of the desolation that lets suspicion and bias and dark myths thrive from the native legend that animals might be dominated or possessed by the spirits of humans. And it doesn’t romanticise the hardscrabble life led by the villagers, in which brutality, whether that of the wild or mankind, always looms at the periphery, poised to explode. Yet the personas seldom evolve more than ciphers – or maybe, while the conflicts amid fairness and revenge, rationality and religion, virtue and wickedness escalate, representative characters in a fable – preventing the whole thing truly coming to life.

Tonal Inconsistencies

And then, there are the many tonally jarring moments where the pastor’s ability to discover clues and determine the maid’s destiny becomes almost risible. He stands looking at shattered containers and clumps of hair within storage sheds like a combined Hercule Poirot the English sleuth – with Jussi a rather hapless assistant figure (neither of whom had to taste a blend of blood spatter and the boss’s spit to confirm that indeed, it was clearly coagulated blood on the site), prior to declaring his newest conclusion and pulling a body from a bog.

Opposing Goals

The local leaders are bent on demonstrating that the maid was killed by a bear, maybe to preserve the calm, or possibly to shield one of their own. The clergyman is bent on establishing the opposite, and the evidence so rapidly stacks up in his favour that once more the drama’s plausibility and audience tolerance are tested. In its finest moments, the series evokes memories of the TV version some years back of Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, through its portrayal of the opposing allures and terrors offered by rational thought and belief. In its low points, it resembles a bear-themed police procedural. Nevertheless, it appears to offer the response to the earlier query: “Females, choose the animal.”

• To Cook a Bear streams on Disney+ currently.