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An intense debate recently went viral across online platforms, after someone posed a query for females: would you rather find yourself stranded in a forest alongside a male or a bear? Like all the most engaging hypothetical scenarios, it revealed vastly opposing perspectives and experiences, highlighted chasms between the sexes, and could easily to induce a deep personal dilemma if you thought about it for too long. There was also the predictable coda in which men of a certain stripe took to the internet to tell females how stupid they were for choosing the bear and proceeded to limn the punishments they merited for that choice. This at minimum allowed the women who had been hesitating over their choice to decide with renewed assurance.

Dramatising the Scenario

The Bear-Cooking Tale effectively brings to life this clever little setup. This six-episode drama is based on Scandinavian writer the novelist’s 2018 book of the same name (translated two years later for English readers). It follows the struggles of a clergyman (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his household when they arrive to begin a fresh religious post in Kengis, an isolated settlement in Sweden’s north, during the mid-19th century. In a place lacking many joys, not one of the inhabitants especially warm to his strict approach to alcohol and revelry, yet it is his defense of the poor – especially the indigenous Sami, from among whom hails the pastor’s adopted son Jussi (the young actor) – and his belief in social justice and equality that sets him on a collision course with the Kengis powers that be.

The Antagonists

Quickly in cahoots against him include the lawman Brahe (the performer), the fearsome factory proprietor Madam Sjödahl (the actress), observed initially firing a newly injured laborer with minimal compensation while he is still babbling at the sight his crushed hand, and anyone else who profit from a community who can be bought for a few bottles of the whisky provided by the unsettling store owner the merchant Lindmark (the actor). Although, to be fair, Lindmark’s eeriness diminishes once travelling artist the artist Beronius appears on the scene (the performer, delivering a performance of exceptional unsettling intensity). If they are – similar to the clergyman – only a little more being stereotypes, they are at least effective ones.

Narrative Development

Once the foundations of conflict sown, the moment arrives to get down with the storyline. The maid employed by the doctor, the character Hilda (the actress), duly vanishes in the forest. Signs of her escape and animal scratches on a tree get discovered but she is nowhere to be seen. Rumours and fears of a man/maid-eating beast prowling the woodland spread, but the pastor has another theory which he and his ward set out to verify.

A Strange Creation

This Bear Drama is a slightly peculiar show. It creates a fine sense of the desolation that lets distrust and prejudice and grim legends flourish based on local folklore that bears can be controlled or possessed by the souls of men. And it doesn’t idealising the hardscrabble life experienced by the residents, where violence, whether that of nature or mankind, always looms at the periphery, poised to explode. But the characters rarely become more than ciphers – or maybe, while the conflicts amid fairness and revenge, logic and religion, good and evil intensify, emblematic figures in a fable – preventing the entire production fully coming to life.

Stylistic Shifts

And then, exist the many stylistically clashing instances in which the clergyman’s skill in finding evidence and discern Hilda’s fate turns almost risible. He positions himself looking at 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 (neither of whom were required to lick a mixture of blood droplets and the boss’s spit to confirm that, yes, it was definitely coagulated blood on the site), prior to declaring his latest deduction and extracting a corpse from a bog.

Opposing Goals

The village elite are bent on proving that Hilda was killed by an animal, perhaps to protect the peace, perhaps to shield a fellow elite. The pastor is bent on establishing the opposite, and the proof so quickly stacks up supporting his view that once more the drama’s plausibility and audience tolerance get strained. At its best, To Cook a Bear is reminiscent of the TV version some years back of Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, through its portrayal of the competing attractions and terrors offered by rational thought and belief. At its worst, it resembles Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Nevertheless, it does seem to provide the response to the earlier query: “Females, choose the animal.”

• The series streams on Disney+ now.