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A intense discussion lately spread widely across online platforms, after someone asked the question to women: which would you prefer find yourself stranded in the woods with a man or a bear? Similar to the most engaging thought experiments, it exposed wildly different perspectives and experiences, illuminated chasms among genders, and could easily cause a deep personal dilemma for anyone pondering on it for too long. There was also the almost inevitable follow-up in which men of a certain stripe took to the internet to tell females how foolish they were to select the animal and proceeded to limn the punishments they merited for that choice. This at minimum allowed the women who were uncertain over their choice to make it with a new confidence.

Portraying the Setup

The Bear-Cooking Tale effectively dramatises this nifty little setup. The six-part series is adapted on Scandinavian writer Mikael Niemi’s 2018 book of the same name (translated two years later for an English audience). It traces the tribulations of a pastor (the lead actor) and his household as they come to begin a new ministry in Kengis, a remote settlement in northern Sweden, during the mid-19th century. In a place with few pleasures, not one of the inhabitants especially warm to his strict stance on drinking and dancing, but it is his protection of impoverished people – particularly the indigenous Sami, from among whom comes the preacher’s foster child Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his conviction in societal fairness and equal rights that places him on a collision course with the Kengis powers that be.

The Opposing Forces

Soon in cahoots opposing him are the sheriff the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the intimidating mill owner Madam Sjödahl (Pernilla August), observed initially firing a newly injured laborer with a month’s pay while he is still gibbering at the sight his crushed hand, and anyone else who profit from a community who can be bought with some containers of liquor provided by the unsettling store owner Lindmark (the actor). However, in fairness, Lindmark’s eeriness diminishes once itinerant painter the artist Beronius arrives on the scene (Simon J Berger, providing a performance of rare discomfiting power). While they remain – like the pastor himself – just slightly beyond than caricatures, they still serve as potent archetypes.

Plot Progression

With the seeds of tension sown, it is time to get down to narrative business. The maid employed by the doctor, the character Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), accordingly goes missing in the forest. Signs of her escape and animal scratches upon a trunk are found yet she remains completely absent. Gossip and anxieties of a man/maid-eating beast prowling the woods circulate, but the pastor has another theory which he and his ward embark to prove.

A Strange Creation

To Cook a Bear is a somewhat peculiar show. It conjures a strong impression of the bleakness that allows distrust and bias and dark myths flourish based on local folklore that animals can be controlled or possessed by the spirits of humans. And it doesn’t idealising the hardscrabble life led by the villagers, where brutality, whether that of nature or people, always looms on the edges, waiting to erupt. Yet the personas seldom evolve more than ciphers – or perhaps, as the struggles between justice and revenge, rationality and religion, good and wickedness escalate, representative characters within a moral tale – which stops the whole thing truly coming to life.

Stylistic Shifts

And then, there are the many stylistically clashing moments in which the clergyman’s skill to discover clues and discern the maid’s destiny turns almost risible. He stands looking at shattered containers and clumps of hair within storage sheds as a fusion of the Belgian detective the English sleuth – with Jussi a rather hapless Hastings-cum-Watson (none of whom were required to lick a mixture of blood droplets and the boss’s spit to confirm that indeed, it was clearly coagulated blood at the crime scene), prior to declaring his latest deduction and pulling a corpse out of a swamp.

Opposing Goals

The local leaders are bent on demonstrating that the maid was killed by an animal, perhaps to protect the calm, perhaps to shield one of their own. The pastor is intent on proving the opposite, and the proof so quickly stacks up supporting his view that again the show’s credibility and the viewer’s patience get strained. In its finest moments, To Cook a Bear is reminiscent of the TV version some years back of Sarah Perry’s the serpent tale, through its portrayal of the competing allures and terrors presented by rational thought and belief. In its low points, it resembles Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Nevertheless, it does seem to provide the response to the earlier query: “Ladies, take the bear.”

• The series streams on Disney+ now.