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A heated discussion lately spread widely across online platforms, following a user asked a query to women: which would you prefer find yourself stranded in the woods alongside a male or a bear? Similar to the most engaging thought experiments, it revealed wildly different perspectives and life encounters, illuminated chasms between the sexes, and was likely cause a deep personal dilemma for anyone pondering about it for too long. There was also the predictable follow-up in which men of a certain stripe came online to tell women how stupid they were to select the animal and proceeded to limn the punishments they deserved for it. This at least allowed the women who had been hesitating about their decision to make it with a new confidence.

Portraying the Scenario

The Bear-Cooking Tale effectively brings to life this nifty small premise. The six-part series is adapted on Swedish author Mikael Niemi’s 2018 novel of the same name (rendered in 2020 for English readers). It follows the tribulations of a pastor (the lead actor) and his family when they arrive to begin a fresh religious post within Kengis, a remote settlement in Sweden’s north, during the mid-19th century. Within a community with few pleasures, not one of the locals particularly appreciate his strict stance on drinking and dancing, but it is his defense of impoverished people – particularly the native Sami population, from which comes the pastor’s adopted son the youth Jussi (the young actor) – and his conviction in societal fairness and equal rights that places him on a collision course against the Kengis local authorities.

The Opposing Forces

Soon collaborating against him are the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the fearsome factory proprietor the matron Sjödahl (the actress), seen early on firing a newly injured laborer with a month’s pay while he is still gibbering at the sight his crushed hand, and all others who profit from a populace who can be bought for a few bottles of liquor provided by the creepy shopkeeper Lindmark (the actor). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s eeriness pales once travelling artist the artist Beronius arrives on the scene (Simon J Berger, delivering an acting turn of rare discomfiting power). While they remain – like the pastor himself – just slightly beyond than caricatures, they are at least potent archetypes.

Narrative Development

Once the foundations of tension planted, it is time to get down with the storyline. The servant employed by the doctor, Hilda (the actress), accordingly vanishes from the woods. Signs of her escape and bear markings upon a trunk are found but she is completely absent. Rumours and fears of a man/maid-eating beast roaming the woodland spread, but the pastor holds a different view which he and his ward embark to verify.

An Odd Beast

To Cook a Bear is a somewhat odd beast. It conjures a fine sense of the bleakness that lets distrust and bias and grim legends thrive from the native legend that bears can be controlled or inhabited by the spirits of men. And it doesn’t idealising the hardscrabble life experienced by the villagers, in which violence, whether that of the wild or mankind, always looms on the edges, poised to explode. But the characters rarely become more than ciphers – or maybe, as the struggles between justice and vengeance, rationality and faith, virtue and evil intensify, representative characters in a fable – preventing the entire production fully becoming immersive.

Tonal Inconsistencies

And then, there are numerous tonally jarring instances in which the pastor’s ability to discover clues and determine the maid’s destiny becomes nearly laughable. He stands looking at broken milk pots and clumps of hair in hay barns like a combined Hercule Poirot the English sleuth – with Jussi a particularly unfortunate Hastings-cum-Watson (neither of whom were required to taste a mixture of blood droplets and the boss’s spit to agree that, yes, it was definitely coagulated blood at the crime scene), prior to declaring his latest deduction and extracting a body out of a swamp.

Clashing Agendas

The local leaders are determined demonstrating that Hilda met her end by an animal, perhaps to protect the peace, perhaps to protect one of their own. The pastor is intent on establishing the opposite, and the proof so rapidly stacks up in his favour that again the show’s credibility and the viewer’s patience are tested. In its finest moments, the series evokes memories of the TV version some years back of Sarah Perry’s the serpent tale, with its evocation of the competing allures and terrors offered by science and belief. In its low points, it’s more like a bear-themed police procedural. Nevertheless, it does seem to provide the answer to the earlier query: “Females, choose the animal.”

• To Cook a Bear streams on Disney+ currently.