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A heated debate recently went viral on social media, following a user posed the question for females: which would you prefer be lost in a forest with a man or a bear? Like all the most engaging thought experiments, it exposed wildly different perspectives and life encounters, illuminated chasms among genders, and was likely to induce a deep personal dilemma for anyone pondering on it extensively. There was also the predictable coda in which some males came online to inform women how stupid they were for choosing the animal and proceeded to limn the punishments they merited for that choice. This at least enabled those females who had been hesitating about their decision to decide with a new confidence.

Dramatising the Setup

The Bear-Cooking Tale effectively dramatises this clever little setup. This six-episode series is based on Scandinavian writer the novelist’s 2018 novel with the identical title (rendered in 2020 for English readers). It traces the struggles of a pastor (the lead actor) and his family when they arrive to start 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 especially warm to his puritanical stance on drinking and dancing, but it is his defense of the poor – especially the indigenous Sami, from which hails the pastor’s foster child the youth Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his conviction in social justice and equality that places him on a collision course with the Kengis powers that be.

The Antagonists

Soon collaborating against him are the lawman the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the intimidating factory proprietor the matron Sjödahl (Pernilla August), seen initially dismissing a newly injured laborer with a month’s pay while he is still babbling upon seeing of his pulped hand, and all others who profit from a populace who can be bought for a few bottles of liquor sold by the unsettling shopkeeper Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). However, in fairness, Lindmark’s creepiness pales once travelling artist Beronius arrives in the story (Simon J Berger, delivering an acting turn of exceptional unsettling intensity). While they remain – like the pastor himself – only a little more than caricatures, they are at least effective ones.

Plot Progression

Once the foundations of conflict planted, it is time to get down with the storyline. The maid from the doctor’s house, Hilda (the actress), duly goes missing from the woods. Signs of her flight and bear markings on a tree are found but she is completely absent. Gossip and fears regarding a human-devouring bear roaming the woods circulate, but the pastor holds a different view which he and his ward set out to prove.

An Odd Beast

This Bear Drama is a slightly peculiar show. It creates a fine sense of the bleakness that lets distrust and prejudice and grim legends thrive based on local folklore that animals might be dominated or inhabited by the souls of humans. It avoids idealising the hardscrabble life led by the residents, where brutality, be it from nature or mankind, lurks constantly on the edges, waiting to erupt. But the characters seldom evolve more than ciphers – or perhaps, as the struggles amid fairness and revenge, rationality and faith, virtue and wickedness escalate, representative characters in a fable – preventing the entire production fully coming to life.

Stylistic Shifts

And then, exist numerous tonally jarring moments in which the pastor’s ability to discover clues and determine the maid’s destiny becomes almost risible. He stands observing shattered containers and clumps of hair within storage sheds as a fusion of the Belgian detective the English sleuth – with Jussi a particularly unfortunate Hastings-cum-Watson (none of whom were required to taste a blend of blood droplets and saliva from his superior to confirm that, yes, it was clearly coagulated blood at the crime scene), prior to declaring his latest deduction and pulling a corpse from a bog.

Clashing Agendas

The local leaders are determined demonstrating that Hilda was killed by an animal, maybe to protect the peace, or possibly to protect a fellow elite. The clergyman is intent on proving the opposite, and the proof so rapidly accumulates supporting his view that once more the show’s credibility and audience tolerance are tested. In its finest moments, To Cook a Bear is reminiscent of the adaptation some years back of Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the competing allures and terrors offered by rational thought and religion. At its worst, it resembles a bear-themed police procedural. Nevertheless, it appears to provide the answer to that debated question: “Ladies, take the bear.”

• To Cook a Bear streams on Disney+ currently.