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A heated discussion lately went viral on social media, after someone posed the question to women: which would you prefer be lost in a forest with a man or with a bear? Similar to the best thought experiments, it exposed wildly different perspectives and experiences, illuminated divides between the sexes, and could easily to induce an existential crisis if you thought about it extensively. There was also the almost inevitable coda in which men of a certain stripe came online to inform females how stupid they were to select the animal and went on to describe the punishments they deserved for that choice. This at least allowed those females who were uncertain over their choice to make it with a new confidence.

Portraying the Setup

The Bear-Cooking Tale effectively brings to life this nifty small premise. The six-part drama is based from Swedish author Mikael Niemi’s 2018 novel with the identical title (rendered two years later for an English audience). It follows the tribulations of a clergyman (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his family when they arrive to start a fresh religious post within Kengis, a remote village in Sweden’s north, during the mid-19th century. Within a community with few pleasures, none of the inhabitants especially warm to his strict stance on alcohol and revelry, but it is his defense of the poor – especially the indigenous Sami, from which hails the pastor’s adopted son the youth Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in societal fairness and equality that places him in direct opposition against the Kengis powers that be.

The Antagonists

Soon in cahoots against him are the lawman the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the fearsome factory proprietor Madam Sjödahl (Pernilla August), seen early on firing a recently mangled worker with a month’s pay while he is still babbling upon seeing of his pulped hand, and anyone else who benefit from a community easily swayed with some containers of the whisky sold by the creepy store owner the merchant Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s creepiness diminishes once travelling artist Beronius arrives on the scene (Simon J Berger, delivering an acting turn of rare unsettling intensity). While they remain – similar to the clergyman – just slightly beyond than caricatures, they are at least effective ones.

Narrative Development

Once the foundations of conflict planted, it is time to get down to narrative business. The servant from the doctor’s house, Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), duly vanishes from the woods. Signs of her escape and bear markings upon a trunk get discovered but she is completely absent. Rumours and anxieties of a man/maid-eating beast prowling the woods spread, but the pastor has another theory that he and Jussi set out to prove.

A Strange Creation

To Cook a Bear is a somewhat odd beast. It creates a fine sense of the desolation that allows distrust and prejudice and grim legends thrive based on local folklore that bears might be dominated or inhabited by the spirits of humans. It avoids romanticise the hardscrabble life experienced by the residents, in which violence, be it from nature or people, always looms on the edges, poised to explode. Yet the personas rarely become beyond symbols – or maybe, while the conflicts between justice and revenge, rationality and religion, virtue and wickedness intensify, emblematic figures within a moral tale – which stops the entire production truly coming to life.

Tonal Inconsistencies

Additionally, there are numerous tonally jarring moments in which the clergyman’s skill in finding evidence and discern the maid’s destiny becomes nearly laughable. He stands observing broken milk pots and clumps of hair in hay barns like a combined Hercule Poirot the English sleuth – alongside Jussi a rather hapless assistant figure (none of whom had to taste a mixture of blood spatter and the boss’s spit to confirm that, yes, it was definitely dried blood at the crime scene), prior to declaring his latest deduction and pulling a body from a bog.

Opposing Goals

The local leaders are bent on proving that Hilda was killed by an animal, maybe to protect the peace, perhaps to shield a fellow elite. The clergyman is intent on establishing the opposite, and the proof so quickly accumulates in his favour that again the drama’s plausibility and the viewer’s patience are tested. At its best, To Cook a Bear evokes memories of the adaptation a few years ago of Sarah Perry’s the serpent tale, with its evocation of the opposing attractions and terrors offered by science and belief. In its low points, it’s more like a bear-themed police procedural. Nevertheless, it appears to provide the answer to that debated question: “Ladies, take the bear.”

• The series is on Disney+ currently.