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An heated discussion recently went viral across online platforms, after a user posed the question to women: which would you prefer be lost in the woods with a man or with a bear? Like all the best thought experiments, it revealed vastly opposing perspectives and experiences, highlighted chasms between the sexes, and was likely to induce an existential crisis if you thought about it for too long. There was also the predictable follow-up in which some males took to the internet to inform women how foolish they had been to select the animal and went on to describe the punishments they merited for it. This at minimum allowed the women who had been hesitating over their choice to decide with renewed assurance.

Dramatising the Setup

The Bear-Cooking Tale skillfully brings to life this clever small premise. This six-episode series is based on Scandinavian writer the novelist’s 2018 book with the identical title (translated in 2020 for an English audience). It traces the tribulations of a clergyman (the lead actor) and his family as they come to begin a new ministry within Kengis, a remote settlement in Sweden’s north, during the mid-19th century. In a place with few pleasures, none of the inhabitants especially appreciate his puritanical stance on alcohol and dancing, but it is his protection of the poor – especially the native Sami population, from which comes the pastor’s foster child Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his conviction in societal fairness and equal rights that places him in direct opposition with the Kengis powers that be.

The Opposing Forces

Quickly collaborating against him include the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the fearsome factory proprietor the matron Sjödahl (Pernilla August), seen initially dismissing a recently mangled laborer with a month’s pay while he is still babbling at the sight his crushed hand, and anyone else who benefit from a populace easily swayed for a few bottles of liquor provided by the unsettling store owner the merchant Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). Although, to be fair, Lindmark’s creepiness pales once itinerant painter Beronius arrives in the story (the performer, delivering a performance of rare unsettling intensity). If they are – like the pastor himself – just slightly beyond than caricatures, they are at least potent archetypes.

Narrative Development

With the seeds of conflict sown, it is time to get down with the storyline. The maid from the doctor’s house, the character Hilda (the actress), accordingly goes missing from the woods. Indications of her escape and animal scratches upon a trunk are found yet she remains nowhere to be seen. Rumours and anxieties of a man/maid-eating beast roaming the woods spread, but the pastor holds a different view which he and his ward embark to verify.

A Strange Creation

This Bear Drama is a somewhat peculiar show. It conjures a fine sense of the desolation that lets suspicion and prejudice and grim legends thrive based on local folklore that bears might be dominated or possessed by the spirits of humans. It avoids romanticise the tough existence led by the residents, in which violence, be it from nature or people, always looms at the periphery, poised to explode. But the characters rarely become beyond symbols – or maybe, while the conflicts amid fairness and vengeance, rationality and religion, good and evil escalate, emblematic figures in a fable – which stops the whole thing fully becoming immersive.

Stylistic Shifts

And then, there are numerous stylistically clashing instances in which the clergyman’s skill to discover clues and determine the maid’s destiny turns nearly laughable. He stands looking at broken milk pots and clumps of hair within storage sheds like a combined the Belgian detective and Sherlock Holmes – alongside Jussi a rather hapless assistant figure (none of whom had to taste a blend of blood droplets and the boss’s spit to agree that, yes, it was definitely coagulated blood at the crime scene), prior to declaring his newest conclusion and extracting a body from a bog.

Clashing Agendas

The village elite are bent on demonstrating that the maid was killed by an animal, perhaps to preserve the calm, or possibly to protect one of their own. The clergyman is bent on establishing the opposite, and the proof so rapidly stacks up in his favour that again the show’s credibility and audience tolerance get strained. In its finest moments, To Cook a Bear evokes memories of the adaptation some years back of the author’s the serpent tale, through its portrayal of the competing attractions and fears presented by rational thought and religion. In its low points, it resembles a bear-themed police procedural. Still, it does seem to provide the answer to that debated question: “Ladies, take the bear.”

• The series streams on Disney+ now.