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A heated discussion lately spread widely on social media, after someone posed the question to women: would you rather be lost in the woods alongside a male or a bear? Like all the most engaging hypothetical scenarios, it revealed wildly different perspectives and life encounters, highlighted divides among genders, and could easily to induce a deep personal dilemma if you thought on it for too long. There was also the predictable coda where some males took to the internet to inform women how stupid they had been for choosing the animal and proceeded to limn the punishments they deserved for it. This at least allowed those females who were uncertain over their choice to make it with a new confidence.

Dramatising the Scenario

The Bear-Cooking Tale skillfully brings to life this clever small premise. The six-part series is based on Swedish author Mikael Niemi’s 2018 book of the same name (rendered two years later for an English audience). It traces the tribulations of a clergyman (the lead actor) and his family as they come to start a fresh religious post within Kengis, an isolated village in Sweden’s north, in 1852. In a place with few pleasures, none of the inhabitants particularly appreciate his puritanical approach to alcohol and revelry, but it is his protection of impoverished people – particularly the native Sami population, from which hails the pastor’s foster child Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his conviction in social justice and equal rights that places him in direct opposition with the Kengis powers that be.

The Opposing Forces

Quickly collaborating opposing him include the lawman the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the intimidating factory proprietor the matron Sjödahl (the actress), seen early on firing a recently mangled laborer with a month’s pay as he remains babbling upon seeing of his pulped hand, and all others who benefit from a community who can be bought with some containers of liquor sold by the unsettling store owner the merchant Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). However, in fairness, Lindmark’s eeriness pales once itinerant painter Beronius appears in the story (Simon J Berger, providing a performance of rare unsettling intensity). If they are – similar to the clergyman – only a little more being stereotypes, they are at least potent archetypes.

Narrative Development

Once the foundations of conflict planted, it is time to get down with the storyline. The servant from the doctor’s house, Hilda (the actress), duly vanishes in the forest. Indications of her escape and animal scratches on a tree are found yet she remains completely absent. Gossip and anxieties of a man/maid-eating bear prowling the woods circulate, yet the clergyman has another theory which he and his ward embark to verify.

A Strange Creation

This Bear Drama is a somewhat peculiar show. It conjures a fine sense of the desolation that allows distrust and bias and dark myths flourish from the native legend that animals can be controlled or possessed by the spirits of men. And it doesn’t idealising the hardscrabble life experienced by the residents, where violence, whether that of the wild or people, lurks constantly on the edges, poised to explode. Yet the personas seldom evolve more than ciphers – or maybe, as the struggles amid fairness and revenge, logic and religion, virtue and wickedness escalate, emblematic figures in a fable – which stops the entire production fully becoming immersive.

Stylistic Shifts

And then, exist the many stylistically clashing instances in which the pastor’s ability to discover clues and discern Hilda’s fate turns almost risible. He positions himself observing broken milk pots and strands of fur in hay barns like a combined Hercule Poirot the English sleuth – with Jussi a particularly unfortunate Hastings-cum-Watson (neither of whom had to taste a mixture of blood spatter and saliva from his superior to agree that indeed, it was definitely coagulated blood on the site), prior to declaring his latest deduction and pulling a corpse out of a swamp.

Opposing Goals

The village elite are determined demonstrating that the maid met her end by an animal, perhaps to preserve the calm, perhaps to shield a fellow elite. The clergyman is bent on establishing otherwise, and the evidence so quickly stacks up supporting his view that once more the drama’s plausibility and audience tolerance get strained. In its finest moments, the series evokes memories of the adaptation some years back of Sarah Perry’s the serpent tale, through its portrayal of the opposing attractions and terrors offered by rational thought and religion. At its worst, it resembles Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Still, it does seem to provide the answer to the earlier query: “Females, choose the animal.”

• To Cook a Bear streams on Disney+ now.