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A heated debate lately spread widely across online platforms, following someone posed a query to women: would you rather be lost in the woods alongside a male or with a bear? Like all the best hypothetical scenarios, it revealed wildly different perspectives and experiences, highlighted chasms among genders, and could easily to induce a deep personal dilemma for anyone pondering about it for too long. Additionally, there came the almost inevitable coda where men of a certain stripe came online to inform females how foolish they had been for choosing the bear and proceeded to limn the punishments they deserved for that choice. This at minimum allowed the women who had been hesitating about their decision to make it with a new confidence.

Dramatising the Setup

The Bear-Cooking Tale skillfully dramatises this clever small premise. The six-part drama is based from Swedish author the novelist’s 2018 novel of the same name (rendered two years later for an English audience). It follows the struggles of a clergyman (the lead actor) and his household when they arrive to begin a new ministry in Kengis, a remote settlement in northern Sweden, during the mid-19th century. Within a community lacking many joys, none of the inhabitants particularly warm to his puritanical stance on alcohol and dancing, yet it is his protection of impoverished people – especially the native Sami population, from which hails the preacher’s foster child Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in societal fairness and equal rights that places him in direct opposition with the Kengis powers that be.

The Antagonists

Soon collaborating against him are the lawman the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the fearsome factory proprietor the matron Sjödahl (Pernilla August), seen initially firing a newly injured laborer with minimal compensation as he remains babbling at the sight his crushed hand, and anyone else who profit from a populace who can be bought for a few bottles of liquor sold by the unsettling shopkeeper Lindmark (the actor). Although, to be fair, Lindmark’s creepiness pales when travelling artist Beronius appears on the scene (the performer, delivering an acting turn of rare discomfiting power). If they are – like the pastor himself – just slightly beyond than caricatures, they are at least effective ones.

Narrative Development

Once the foundations of tension sown, it is time to proceed with the storyline. The servant employed by the doctor, Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), duly goes missing in the forest. Indications of her flight and bear markings on a tree are found but she is nowhere to be seen. Rumours and anxieties of a man/maid-eating beast roaming the woodland circulate, yet the clergyman has another theory which he and his ward set out to verify.

An Odd Beast

This Bear Drama is a slightly peculiar show. It conjures a fine sense of the bleakness that allows suspicion and bias and grim legends flourish from the native legend that bears can be controlled or possessed by the spirits of humans. It avoids idealising the tough existence experienced by the residents, in which brutality, be it from nature or people, always looms at the periphery, waiting to erupt. Yet the personas rarely become more than ciphers – or perhaps, as the struggles amid fairness and revenge, logic and religion, good and evil escalate, emblematic figures in a fable – preventing the whole thing truly becoming immersive.

Stylistic Shifts

And then, exist the many stylistically clashing moments where the clergyman’s skill in finding evidence and determine Hilda’s fate turns almost risible. He stands observing broken milk pots and clumps of hair within storage sheds like a combined the Belgian detective and Sherlock Holmes – alongside Jussi a rather hapless Hastings-cum-Watson (neither of whom had to taste a mixture of blood spatter and the boss’s spit to agree that, yes, it was clearly dried blood on the site), before announcing his latest deduction and pulling a body out of a swamp.

Clashing Agendas

The local leaders are determined demonstrating that the maid met her end by an animal, perhaps to protect the calm, or possibly to shield one of their own. The clergyman is bent on proving otherwise, and the evidence so rapidly accumulates in his favour that again the show’s credibility and audience tolerance are tested. In its finest moments, the series is reminiscent of the TV version some years back of the author’s the serpent tale, with its evocation of the competing attractions and terrors offered by science and belief. At its worst, it resembles Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Nevertheless, it appears to provide the answer to the earlier query: “Females, choose the animal.”

• To Cook a Bear is on Disney+ now.