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An heated debate recently spread widely on social media, after a user posed the question to women: which would you prefer be lost in a forest alongside a male or a bear? Like all the best thought experiments, it exposed wildly different worldviews and life encounters, highlighted divides among genders, and was likely cause an existential crisis for anyone pondering on it for too long. There was also the almost inevitable coda where men of a certain stripe took to the internet to inform females how foolish they had been for choosing the bear and went on to limn the punishments they deserved for it. This at minimum allowed those females who were uncertain over their choice to make it with renewed assurance.

Dramatising the Scenario

The Bear-Cooking Tale skillfully dramatises this clever small premise. The six-part drama is adapted on Scandinavian writer Mikael Niemi’s 2018 book of the same name (rendered in 2020 for English readers). It traces the struggles of a pastor (the lead actor) and his household when they arrive to begin a fresh religious post in Kengis, an isolated village in northern Sweden, in 1852. Within a community with few pleasures, not one of the inhabitants especially appreciate his strict approach to alcohol and revelry, but it is his protection of impoverished people – particularly the native Sami population, from which comes the preacher’s adopted son the youth Jussi (the young actor) – and his belief in social justice and equal rights that sets him in direct opposition with the Kengis local authorities.

The Antagonists

Quickly collaborating opposing him include the lawman the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the fearsome mill owner 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 of his pulped hand, and all others who benefit from a community who can be bought with some containers of liquor sold by the creepy shopkeeper the merchant Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s creepiness diminishes when travelling artist the artist Beronius appears in the story (the performer, providing an acting turn of rare unsettling intensity). While they remain – similar to the clergyman – just slightly beyond than caricatures, they still serve as potent archetypes.

Plot Progression

With the seeds of tension planted, the moment arrives to get down with the storyline. The maid employed by the doctor, the character Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), accordingly vanishes from the woods. Signs of her escape and animal scratches upon a trunk are found but she is completely absent. Rumours and anxieties of a man/maid-eating bear roaming the woods circulate, but the pastor holds a different view which he and his ward embark to prove.

An Odd Beast

This Bear Drama is a somewhat peculiar show. It creates a fine sense of the desolation that allows suspicion and bias and dark myths thrive based on local folklore that bears can be controlled or inhabited by the souls of humans. It avoids romanticise the hardscrabble life led by the villagers, where violence, be it from the wild or people, always looms at the periphery, poised to explode. But the characters seldom evolve more than ciphers – or perhaps, while the conflicts between justice and vengeance, logic and faith, good and wickedness intensify, representative characters within a moral tale – preventing the entire production truly becoming immersive.

Stylistic Shifts

And then, there are numerous tonally jarring instances where the pastor’s ability in finding evidence and discern the maid’s destiny turns almost risible. He positions himself looking at shattered containers and clumps of hair in hay barns as a fusion of the Belgian detective and Sherlock Holmes – with Jussi a particularly unfortunate assistant figure (none of whom had to taste a blend of blood spatter and saliva from his superior to agree that, yes, it was definitely coagulated blood on the site), prior to declaring his latest deduction and pulling a corpse from a bog.

Opposing Goals

The village elite are determined proving that Hilda met her end by a bear, maybe to preserve the peace, perhaps to protect a fellow elite. The pastor is bent on establishing the opposite, and the proof so rapidly accumulates in his favour that once more the drama’s plausibility and audience tolerance are tested. In its finest moments, To Cook a Bear evokes memories of the TV version some years back of Sarah Perry’s the serpent tale, with its evocation of the competing allures and fears offered by science and belief. At its worst, it’s more like a bear-themed police procedural. Nevertheless, it does seem to offer the answer to that debated question: “Females, choose the animal.”

• The series streams on Disney+ currently.