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An intense debate lately went viral across online platforms, following someone asked a query for females: which would you prefer be lost in the woods alongside a male or with a bear? Similar to the best hypothetical scenarios, it exposed vastly opposing worldviews and experiences, highlighted chasms among genders, and was likely to induce an existential crisis if you thought on it for too long. There was also the predictable coda where some males came online to inform women how stupid they were for choosing the animal and went on to limn the consequences they deserved for that choice. This at minimum enabled the women who were uncertain about their decision to decide with a new confidence.

Dramatising the Scenario

The Bear-Cooking Tale skillfully dramatises this clever small premise. The six-part series is adapted from Swedish author Mikael Niemi’s 2018 book with the identical title (translated two years later for an English audience). It traces the tribulations of a clergyman (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his household when they arrive to begin a fresh religious post within Kengis, a remote village in Sweden’s north, in 1852. Within a community with few pleasures, none of the locals especially appreciate his puritanical stance on alcohol and revelry, yet it is his defense of impoverished people – especially the indigenous Sami, from which comes the preacher’s adopted son the youth Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his conviction in societal fairness and equal rights that sets him in direct opposition with the Kengis powers that be.

The Antagonists

Quickly in cahoots against him are the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the intimidating factory proprietor Madam Sjödahl (the actress), observed initially firing a recently mangled worker with a month’s pay while he is still gibbering upon seeing of his pulped hand, and all others who benefit from a populace easily swayed with some containers of liquor provided by the unsettling shopkeeper the merchant Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). Although, to be fair, Lindmark’s eeriness diminishes once travelling artist Beronius arrives in the story (the performer, providing an acting turn of exceptional discomfiting power). If they are – similar to the clergyman – just slightly beyond than caricatures, they still serve as effective ones.

Narrative Development

Once the foundations of tension planted, the moment arrives to proceed to narrative business. The servant employed by the doctor, the character Hilda (the actress), duly vanishes in the forest. Indications of her flight and bear markings upon a trunk are found yet she remains nowhere to be seen. Rumours and fears of a man/maid-eating bear prowling the woods spread, yet the clergyman holds a different view that he and Jussi embark to prove.

An Odd Beast

To Cook a Bear is a slightly odd beast. It creates a fine sense of the desolation that allows suspicion and bias and dark myths flourish based on local folklore that animals can be controlled or possessed by the souls of humans. And it doesn’t romanticise the tough existence experienced by the villagers, where violence, be it from the wild or people, always looms at the periphery, poised to explode. But the characters rarely become more than ciphers – or perhaps, as the struggles amid fairness and revenge, logic and faith, good and evil intensify, emblematic figures in a fable – which stops the entire production truly coming to life.

Tonal Inconsistencies

And then, there are numerous tonally jarring instances in which the clergyman’s skill to discover clues and discern Hilda’s fate becomes nearly laughable. He positions himself looking at broken milk pots and clumps of hair in hay barns like a combined the Belgian detective the English sleuth – with Jussi a particularly unfortunate Hastings-cum-Watson (none of whom were required to taste a mixture of blood spatter and saliva from his superior to agree that indeed, it was definitely dried blood on the site), before announcing his newest conclusion and pulling a body out of a swamp.

Opposing Goals

The local leaders are bent on demonstrating that Hilda met her end by a bear, perhaps to preserve the calm, or possibly to shield a fellow elite. The pastor is bent on establishing the opposite, and the proof 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, the series evokes memories of the adaptation a few years ago of Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the opposing attractions and fears offered by science and belief. In its low points, it resembles Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Nevertheless, it appears to offer the answer to that debated question: “Ladies, take the bear.”

• The series streams on Disney+ now.