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An heated discussion recently spread widely on social media, following someone asked the question for females: would you rather find yourself stranded in the woods alongside a male or a bear? Like all the most engaging thought experiments, it revealed wildly different perspectives and life encounters, highlighted divides among genders, and could easily cause an existential crisis if you thought on it for too long. Additionally, there came the almost inevitable follow-up in which men of a certain stripe came online to inform females how stupid they were to select the bear and went on to limn the punishments they deserved for that choice. This at least allowed those females who were uncertain over their choice to make it with renewed assurance.

Portraying the Setup

The Bear-Cooking Tale effectively dramatises this nifty little setup. The six-part series is adapted on Scandinavian writer the novelist’s 2018 book of the same name (rendered two years later for English readers). It follows the struggles of a clergyman (the lead actor) and his family as they come to begin a fresh religious post in Kengis, an isolated settlement in northern Sweden, in 1852. In a place lacking many joys, not one of the locals particularly warm to his strict stance on drinking and dancing, yet it is his defense of the poor – especially the indigenous Sami, from which hails the pastor’s adopted son the youth Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his conviction in social justice and equality that sets him on a collision course with the Kengis local authorities.

The Opposing Forces

Soon collaborating against him include the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the fearsome factory proprietor the matron Sjödahl (Pernilla August), seen initially firing a newly injured worker with minimal compensation while he is still gibbering at the sight his crushed hand, and anyone else who profit from a community who can be bought with some containers of liquor sold by the unsettling shopkeeper the merchant Lindmark (the actor). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s creepiness diminishes when travelling artist Beronius arrives in the story (Simon J Berger, providing an acting turn of exceptional unsettling intensity). If they are – like the pastor himself – just slightly beyond than caricatures, they still serve as effective ones.

Narrative Development

Once the foundations of tension planted, the moment arrives to get down to narrative business. The servant from the doctor’s house, the character Hilda (the actress), accordingly goes missing from the woods. Indications of her flight and bear markings upon a trunk are found but she is nowhere to be seen. Gossip and anxieties of a man/maid-eating bear roaming the woods spread, but the pastor has another theory that he and Jussi embark to verify.

An Odd Beast

This Bear Drama is a slightly peculiar show. It conjures a strong impression of the bleakness that lets distrust and bias and grim legends thrive based on local folklore that animals might be dominated or inhabited by the souls of men. It avoids idealising the tough existence experienced by the villagers, in which brutality, whether that of the wild or mankind, always looms at the periphery, poised to explode. Yet the personas rarely become beyond symbols – or perhaps, while the conflicts amid fairness and revenge, rationality and religion, virtue and wickedness escalate, emblematic figures within a moral tale – preventing the entire production truly coming to life.

Tonal Inconsistencies

And then, exist the many stylistically clashing moments in which the clergyman’s skill to discover clues and determine Hilda’s fate becomes nearly laughable. He stands looking at broken milk pots and strands of fur in hay barns as a fusion of Hercule Poirot the English sleuth – with Jussi a rather hapless assistant figure (none of whom were required to lick a mixture of blood spatter and saliva from his superior to confirm that, yes, it was clearly coagulated blood at the crime scene), prior to declaring his latest deduction and extracting a corpse out of a swamp.

Opposing Goals

The village elite are determined proving that the maid met her end by a bear, maybe to preserve the calm, or possibly to shield a fellow elite. The clergyman is bent on establishing the opposite, and the evidence so quickly accumulates supporting his view that once more the show’s credibility and audience tolerance are tested. At its best, the series evokes memories of the adaptation a few years ago of the author’s the serpent tale, through its portrayal of the competing allures and fears offered by science and belief. In its low points, it resembles Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Still, it appears to offer the answer to the earlier query: “Females, choose the animal.”

• The series streams on Disney+ currently.