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An intense debate recently spread widely across online platforms, following a user asked the question to women: would you rather find yourself stranded in a forest with a man or with a bear? Like all the best hypothetical scenarios, it revealed vastly opposing worldviews and life encounters, highlighted chasms among genders, and was likely cause an existential crisis for anyone pondering about it for too long. There was also the predictable coda where men of a certain stripe took to the internet to inform females how stupid they were to select the bear and proceeded to describe the punishments they deserved for it. This at minimum allowed those females who were uncertain over their choice to make it with a new confidence.

Portraying the Scenario

The Bear-Cooking Tale skillfully dramatises this clever little setup. This six-episode series is adapted from Swedish author the novelist’s 2018 novel of the same name (translated in 2020 for English readers). It follows the tribulations of a pastor (the lead actor) and his family when they arrive to begin a fresh religious post within Kengis, a remote village in Sweden’s north, in 1852. In a place lacking many joys, none of the locals especially warm to his puritanical approach to alcohol and revelry, yet it is his protection of the poor – especially the indigenous Sami, from which hails the pastor’s adopted son Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in societal fairness and equality that places him in direct opposition against the Kengis local authorities.

The Antagonists

Soon in cahoots against him include the lawman the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the fearsome mill owner Madam Sjödahl (Pernilla August), seen early on dismissing a newly injured laborer with minimal compensation as he remains babbling at the sight of his pulped hand, and all others who benefit from a populace easily swayed for a few bottles of the whisky sold by the creepy store owner the merchant Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s eeriness pales once travelling artist the artist Beronius appears on the scene (the performer, delivering a performance of rare discomfiting power). If they are – similar to the clergyman – just slightly beyond being stereotypes, they are at least potent archetypes.

Narrative Development

Once the foundations of tension planted, it is time to get down to narrative business. The servant employed by the doctor, Hilda (the actress), accordingly vanishes in the forest. Signs of her escape and bear markings upon a trunk are found but she is completely absent. Gossip and fears regarding a human-devouring 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 creates a fine sense of the desolation that allows distrust and prejudice and dark myths flourish from the native legend that bears might be dominated or inhabited by the spirits of men. It avoids romanticise the tough existence led by the residents, in which brutality, be it from the wild or mankind, lurks constantly on the edges, poised to explode. Yet the personas seldom evolve more than ciphers – or maybe, while the conflicts amid fairness and revenge, logic and religion, good and evil intensify, emblematic figures within a moral tale – which stops the whole thing fully becoming immersive.

Tonal Inconsistencies

And then, exist the many tonally jarring moments in which the clergyman’s skill to discover clues and discern Hilda’s fate becomes almost risible. He positions himself looking at broken milk pots and clumps of hair in hay barns like a combined Hercule Poirot and Sherlock Holmes – with Jussi a particularly unfortunate Hastings-cum-Watson (neither of whom had to taste a mixture of blood droplets and the boss’s spit to agree that, yes, it was definitely dried blood on the site), prior to declaring his latest deduction and extracting a body out of a swamp.

Opposing Goals

The village elite are determined proving that Hilda was killed by a bear, perhaps to protect the calm, perhaps to shield one of their own. The clergyman is bent on proving otherwise, and the proof so rapidly accumulates in his favour that again the drama’s plausibility and audience tolerance get strained. At its best, the series is reminiscent of the adaptation a few years ago of Sarah Perry’s the serpent tale, with its evocation of the opposing attractions and terrors offered by science and belief. In its low points, it’s more like Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Still, it appears to provide the response to the earlier query: “Females, choose the animal.”

• To Cook a Bear is on Disney+ now.