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An heated discussion recently went viral across online platforms, following someone asked the question for females: which would you prefer find yourself stranded in a forest alongside a male or with a bear? Similar to the most engaging thought experiments, it exposed wildly different perspectives and experiences, highlighted divides between the sexes, and could easily cause a deep personal dilemma if you thought on it extensively. There was also the almost inevitable coda where some males came online to tell women how foolish they had been to select the animal and went on to describe the punishments they merited for that choice. This at least allowed the women who had been hesitating about their decision to decide with renewed assurance.

Dramatising the Scenario

The Bear-Cooking Tale effectively dramatises this nifty little setup. The six-part series is adapted from Scandinavian writer Mikael Niemi’s 2018 book with the identical title (translated two years later for an English audience). It follows the struggles of a clergyman (the lead actor) and his family as they come to begin a new ministry within Kengis, a remote settlement in northern Sweden, during the mid-19th century. Within a community lacking many joys, not one of the inhabitants particularly appreciate his puritanical approach to drinking and revelry, yet it is his defense of the poor – particularly the indigenous Sami, from which hails the preacher’s foster child the youth Jussi (the young actor) – and his conviction in societal fairness and equal rights that places him on a collision course with the Kengis powers that be.

The Antagonists

Soon collaborating against him include the lawman the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the fearsome factory proprietor the matron Sjödahl (Pernilla August), observed initially firing a recently mangled laborer with a month’s pay as he remains gibbering at the sight of his pulped hand, and anyone else who benefit from a populace who can be bought for a few bottles of the whisky provided by the creepy shopkeeper the merchant Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). Although, to be fair, Lindmark’s creepiness pales once itinerant painter Beronius appears in the story (the performer, providing a performance of exceptional unsettling intensity). If they are – similar to the clergyman – just slightly beyond being stereotypes, they are at least potent archetypes.

Plot Progression

Once the foundations of tension sown, the moment arrives to get down to narrative business. The servant from the doctor’s house, Hilda (the actress), accordingly goes missing from the woods. Indications of her flight and animal scratches on a tree get discovered but she is completely absent. Rumours and anxieties of a man/maid-eating beast roaming the woodland circulate, yet the clergyman has another theory which he and his ward set out to verify.

An Odd Beast

This Bear Drama is a somewhat peculiar show. It creates a strong impression of the desolation that allows suspicion and bias and dark myths flourish from the native legend that animals can be controlled or inhabited by the souls of men. And it doesn’t idealising the tough existence experienced by the villagers, in which brutality, whether that of the wild or people, lurks constantly on the edges, waiting to erupt. But the characters rarely become more than ciphers – or maybe, as the struggles between justice and revenge, logic and faith, good and evil intensify, emblematic figures within a moral tale – which stops the entire production truly becoming immersive.

Tonal Inconsistencies

Additionally, there are numerous tonally jarring moments in which the clergyman’s skill in finding evidence and determine Hilda’s fate becomes almost risible. He stands observing broken milk pots and clumps of hair in hay barns as a fusion of the Belgian detective and Sherlock Holmes – with Jussi a rather hapless Hastings-cum-Watson (neither of whom had to taste a blend of blood droplets and the boss’s spit to confirm that indeed, it was definitely coagulated blood on the site), before announcing his newest conclusion and pulling a body from a bog.

Clashing Agendas

The village elite are determined demonstrating that Hilda was killed by a bear, maybe to preserve the calm, perhaps to shield a fellow elite. The pastor is bent on establishing the opposite, and the proof so rapidly accumulates supporting his view 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 the author’s the serpent tale, with its evocation of the competing attractions and terrors presented by science and belief. In its low points, it resembles a bear-themed police procedural. Still, it appears to offer the answer to the earlier query: “Ladies, take the bear.”

• The series streams on Disney+ now.