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A heated debate recently spread widely on social media, following a user asked a query for females: would you rather find yourself stranded in a forest alongside a male or a bear? Similar to the most engaging thought experiments, it exposed wildly different perspectives and experiences, highlighted chasms between the sexes, and could easily to induce an existential crisis if you thought about it for too long. Additionally, there came the predictable coda in which some males came online to tell females how stupid they were for choosing the bear and went on to describe the punishments they deserved for that choice. This at least enabled the women who were uncertain about their decision to decide with renewed assurance.

Dramatising the Setup

The Bear-Cooking Tale effectively dramatises this clever small premise. The six-part drama is based on Swedish author the novelist’s 2018 book of the same name (translated in 2020 for English readers). It follows the tribulations of a pastor (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his household when they arrive to start a new ministry in Kengis, a remote settlement in northern Sweden, in 1852. In a place with few pleasures, none of the inhabitants particularly warm to his puritanical stance on drinking and dancing, yet it is his defense of the poor – especially the indigenous Sami, from among whom hails the preacher’s adopted son the youth Jussi (the young actor) – and his conviction in social justice and equality that places him on a collision course with the Kengis powers that be.

The Antagonists

Quickly in cahoots against him are the sheriff the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the intimidating factory proprietor Madam Sjödahl (Pernilla August), observed initially dismissing a newly injured worker with a month’s pay while he is still babbling upon seeing his crushed hand, and all others who benefit from a populace who can be bought with some containers of the whisky provided by the creepy store owner the merchant Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). However, in fairness, Lindmark’s eeriness pales once travelling artist Beronius appears in the story (the performer, providing a performance of rare discomfiting power). While they remain – like the pastor himself – just slightly beyond being stereotypes, they are at least potent archetypes.

Plot Progression

Once the foundations of conflict planted, the moment arrives to proceed to narrative business. The servant employed by the doctor, the character Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), accordingly goes missing from the woods. Signs of her flight and animal scratches on a tree get discovered yet she remains nowhere to be seen. Rumours and anxieties regarding a human-devouring bear roaming the woodland spread, yet the clergyman has another theory which he and his ward set out to verify.

An Odd Beast

This Bear Drama is a somewhat peculiar show. It conjures a strong impression of the bleakness that lets distrust and bias and grim legends thrive based on local folklore that bears can be controlled or inhabited by the spirits of men. And it doesn’t romanticise the hardscrabble life led by the villagers, in which violence, whether that of nature or mankind, always looms at the periphery, waiting to erupt. But the characters seldom evolve more than ciphers – or maybe, while the conflicts between justice and vengeance, logic and religion, good and evil intensify, representative characters within a moral tale – which stops the entire production fully coming to life.

Tonal Inconsistencies

And then, exist the many stylistically clashing instances where the pastor’s ability in finding evidence and discern the maid’s destiny becomes nearly laughable. He stands looking at broken milk pots and clumps of hair within storage sheds as a fusion of Hercule Poirot the English sleuth – with Jussi a particularly unfortunate Hastings-cum-Watson (neither of whom were required to taste a mixture of blood spatter and saliva from his superior to confirm that indeed, it was clearly coagulated blood at the crime scene), before announcing his latest deduction and pulling a body from a bog.

Clashing Agendas

The local leaders are bent on demonstrating that Hilda was killed by a bear, perhaps to preserve the calm, or possibly to shield one of their own. The pastor is intent on establishing the opposite, and the evidence so rapidly accumulates in his favour that once more the drama’s plausibility and audience tolerance get strained. In its finest moments, the series evokes memories of the TV version some years back of the author’s the serpent tale, through its portrayal of the competing attractions and fears presented by science and religion. In its low points, it resembles Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Still, it appears to offer the response to that debated question: “Females, choose the animal.”

• To Cook a Bear streams on Disney+ now.