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A heated debate lately went viral across online platforms, following a user posed the question to women: which would you prefer be lost in the woods with a man or a bear? Similar to the most engaging hypothetical scenarios, it revealed wildly different perspectives and experiences, highlighted chasms among genders, and was likely to induce an existential crisis for anyone pondering on it for too long. Additionally, there came the almost inevitable follow-up where men of a certain stripe took to the internet to inform women how foolish they were to select the bear and went on to limn the punishments they deserved for it. This at least enabled the women who were uncertain over their choice to make it with a new confidence.

Dramatising the Setup

The Bear-Cooking Tale skillfully dramatises this clever little setup. The six-part series is based from Swedish author the novelist’s 2018 novel with the identical title (rendered two years later for an English audience). It follows the struggles of a pastor (the lead actor) and his household when they arrive to begin a new ministry within Kengis, a remote settlement in northern Sweden, during the mid-19th century. Within a community lacking many joys, not one of the inhabitants particularly warm to his strict stance on alcohol and dancing, but it is his protection of the poor – particularly the native Sami population, from which comes the preacher’s foster child the youth Jussi (the young actor) – and his belief in social justice and equal rights that places him in direct opposition against the Kengis powers that be.

The Antagonists

Soon collaborating against him include the lawman Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the fearsome factory proprietor the matron Sjödahl (Pernilla August), observed initially firing a recently mangled laborer with minimal compensation as he remains gibbering at the sight his crushed hand, and anyone else who benefit from a community who can be bought for a few bottles of liquor sold by the creepy shopkeeper Lindmark (the actor). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s creepiness diminishes when itinerant painter Beronius appears on the scene (the performer, delivering a performance of rare discomfiting power). If they are – like the pastor himself – only a little more than caricatures, they still serve as potent archetypes.

Narrative Development

With the seeds of tension sown, it is time to proceed to narrative business. The maid employed by the doctor, Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), accordingly goes missing from the woods. Signs of her flight and bear markings upon a trunk get discovered yet she remains completely absent. Gossip 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.

An Odd Beast

To Cook a Bear is a somewhat peculiar show. It conjures a strong impression of the desolation that lets suspicion and bias and grim legends flourish from the native legend that animals might be dominated or inhabited by the souls of men. And it doesn’t romanticise the hardscrabble life experienced by the residents, where violence, whether that of the wild or people, lurks constantly on the edges, waiting to erupt. But the characters rarely become beyond symbols – or maybe, as the struggles amid fairness and revenge, rationality and faith, virtue and evil escalate, emblematic figures in a fable – preventing the whole thing truly coming to life.

Stylistic Shifts

Additionally, exist the many stylistically clashing instances in which the clergyman’s skill to discover clues and discern the maid’s destiny turns nearly laughable. He positions himself looking at broken milk pots and clumps of hair in hay barns as a fusion of Hercule Poirot the English sleuth – alongside Jussi a rather hapless Hastings-cum-Watson (none of whom were required to taste a blend of blood droplets and saliva from his superior to agree that indeed, it was clearly dried blood at the crime scene), before announcing his latest deduction and extracting a corpse from a bog.

Clashing Agendas

The village elite are bent on proving that the maid met her end by a bear, perhaps to protect the calm, perhaps to shield one of their own. The pastor is intent on establishing the opposite, and the evidence so quickly accumulates supporting his view that again the show’s credibility and the viewer’s patience are tested. In its finest moments, To Cook a Bear evokes memories of the adaptation some years back of Sarah Perry’s the serpent tale, through its portrayal of the competing attractions and terrors presented by rational thought and religion. In its low points, it resembles a bear-themed police procedural. Nevertheless, it appears to provide the answer to that debated question: “Females, choose the animal.”

• The series streams on Disney+ now.