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A intense debate lately went viral across online platforms, after someone posed a query to women: which would you prefer be lost in the woods with a man or with a bear? Like all the best hypothetical scenarios, it exposed wildly different perspectives and experiences, illuminated chasms between the sexes, and could easily to induce an existential crisis if you thought on it for too long. Additionally, there came the almost inevitable coda in which some males came online to inform women how foolish they were for choosing the bear and went on to limn the consequences they deserved for it. This at minimum allowed those females who had been hesitating over their choice to decide with renewed assurance.

Dramatising the Scenario

The Bear-Cooking Tale effectively dramatises this nifty little setup. The six-part series is based from Scandinavian writer the novelist’s 2018 book of the same name (translated in 2020 for an English audience). It traces the tribulations of a pastor (the lead actor) and his household as they come to start a new ministry within Kengis, a remote settlement in northern Sweden, during the mid-19th century. Within a community with few pleasures, none of the inhabitants especially warm to his puritanical stance on drinking and dancing, yet it is his defense of impoverished people – particularly the indigenous Sami, from among whom hails the preacher’s adopted son Jussi (the young actor) – and his conviction in societal fairness and equal rights that sets him in direct opposition against the Kengis local authorities.

The Antagonists

Quickly collaborating opposing him include the lawman the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the intimidating mill owner the matron Sjödahl (the actress), observed initially firing a newly injured laborer with a month’s pay as he remains babbling upon seeing his crushed hand, and anyone else who profit from a community easily swayed with some containers of the whisky provided by the unsettling shopkeeper Lindmark (the actor). However, in fairness, Lindmark’s eeriness pales once travelling artist the artist Beronius appears on the scene (Simon J Berger, delivering an acting turn of exceptional unsettling intensity). If they are – like the pastor himself – just slightly beyond than caricatures, they still serve as potent archetypes.

Narrative Development

With the seeds of conflict planted, the moment arrives to proceed to narrative business. The servant from the doctor’s house, Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), accordingly goes missing in the forest. Indications of her flight and bear markings upon a trunk are found yet she remains completely absent. Rumours and anxieties regarding a human-devouring beast roaming the woodland spread, but the pastor holds a different view which he and his ward embark to verify.

An Odd Beast

To Cook a Bear is a slightly peculiar show. It creates a fine sense of the bleakness that allows suspicion and prejudice and dark myths flourish based on local folklore that animals might be dominated or possessed by the souls of men. And it doesn’t idealising the tough existence led by the villagers, where brutality, whether that of nature or people, always looms at the periphery, waiting to erupt. But the characters seldom evolve more than ciphers – or perhaps, as the struggles between justice and revenge, logic and faith, virtue and wickedness escalate, representative characters within a moral tale – which stops the entire production fully coming to life.

Stylistic Shifts

Additionally, there are the many tonally jarring instances where the pastor’s ability to discover clues and determine the maid’s destiny turns nearly laughable. He positions himself observing broken milk pots and strands of fur within storage sheds as a fusion of the Belgian detective and Sherlock Holmes – alongside Jussi a particularly unfortunate assistant figure (neither of whom had to lick a blend of blood spatter and the boss’s spit to agree that, yes, it was clearly coagulated blood at the crime scene), prior to declaring his latest deduction and extracting a body from a bog.

Opposing Goals

The village elite are determined demonstrating that the maid met her end by an animal, maybe to preserve the calm, or possibly to protect one of their own. The clergyman is intent on proving the opposite, and the evidence so quickly stacks up in his favour that again the drama’s plausibility and the viewer’s patience get strained. In its finest moments, the series evokes memories of the TV version a few years ago of the author’s the serpent tale, through its portrayal of the opposing attractions and fears offered by science and belief. At its worst, it resembles Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Nevertheless, it appears to offer the answer to that debated question: “Females, choose the animal.”

• The series is on Disney+ now.