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A heated debate lately went viral on social media, following someone posed the question for females: which would you prefer find yourself stranded in a forest alongside a male or a bear? Like all the most engaging hypothetical scenarios, it revealed vastly opposing perspectives and experiences, illuminated divides between the sexes, and was likely cause a deep personal dilemma if you thought on it for too long. There was also the predictable coda in which men of a certain stripe came online to tell women how stupid they were to select the bear and proceeded to describe the punishments they deserved for that choice. This at minimum enabled those females who had been hesitating about their decision to make it with renewed assurance.

Portraying the Setup

The Bear-Cooking Tale skillfully dramatises this nifty small premise. The six-part drama is adapted on Scandinavian writer the novelist’s 2018 novel of the same name (rendered two years later for an English audience). It traces the struggles of a pastor (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his household when they arrive to begin a fresh religious post in Kengis, a remote village in northern Sweden, in 1852. In a place lacking many joys, not one of the inhabitants particularly appreciate his strict stance on alcohol and dancing, yet it is his defense of the poor – particularly the indigenous Sami, from which comes the preacher’s adopted son Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in social justice and equality that sets him on a collision course against the Kengis local authorities.

The Antagonists

Quickly in cahoots against him are the lawman Brahe (the performer), the fearsome factory proprietor Madam Sjödahl (Pernilla August), seen early on dismissing a recently mangled laborer with a month’s pay as he remains babbling upon seeing his crushed hand, and anyone else who profit from a community easily swayed for a few bottles of liquor sold by the unsettling store owner Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). Although, in fairness, Lindmark’s eeriness pales once itinerant painter Beronius arrives in the story (Simon J Berger, providing an acting turn of exceptional unsettling intensity). If they are – similar to the clergyman – only a little more than caricatures, they are at least effective ones.

Plot Progression

Once the foundations of conflict planted, it is time to proceed to narrative business. The maid employed by the doctor, Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), duly goes missing in the forest. Indications of her escape and animal scratches upon a trunk are found but she is completely absent. Gossip and anxieties of a man/maid-eating bear prowling the woodland circulate, but the pastor has another theory which he and his ward set out to verify.

A Strange Creation

To Cook a Bear is a somewhat peculiar show. It creates a fine sense of the desolation that allows distrust and bias and grim legends flourish based on local folklore that animals might be dominated or inhabited by the souls of humans. It avoids romanticise the hardscrabble life experienced by the residents, where brutality, whether that of nature or mankind, always looms at the periphery, poised to explode. Yet the personas rarely become more than ciphers – or perhaps, as the struggles between justice and vengeance, logic and faith, virtue and wickedness intensify, representative characters within a moral tale – which stops the whole thing fully coming to life.

Stylistic Shifts

Additionally, exist numerous stylistically clashing moments in which the pastor’s ability in finding evidence and discern the maid’s destiny turns almost risible. He positions himself looking at shattered containers and clumps of hair within storage sheds like a combined Hercule Poirot the English sleuth – with Jussi a particularly unfortunate assistant figure (none of whom had to taste a blend of blood droplets and the boss’s spit to confirm that indeed, it was definitely dried blood on the site), before announcing his latest deduction and extracting a corpse out of a swamp.

Clashing Agendas

The local leaders are bent on demonstrating that the maid met her end by a bear, perhaps to preserve the calm, or possibly to shield a fellow elite. The pastor is intent on establishing otherwise, and the evidence so rapidly stacks up in his favour that once more the drama’s plausibility and the viewer’s patience are tested. In its finest moments, To Cook a Bear evokes memories of the adaptation a few years ago of Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the competing attractions and terrors offered by science and belief. At its worst, it’s more like a bear-themed police procedural. Nevertheless, it appears to offer the answer to that debated question: “Females, choose the animal.”

• The series streams on Disney+ currently.