The Bear Cooking Drama Review: A Daft Period Mystery Resembles A Bear-Focused Detective Series

An intense debate recently went viral on social media, after a user posed a query to women: would you rather be lost in a forest alongside a male or with a bear? Similar to the most engaging hypothetical scenarios, it revealed wildly different worldviews and experiences, highlighted chasms between the sexes, and could easily to induce a deep personal dilemma if you thought about it for too long. Additionally, there came the almost inevitable follow-up where some males took to the internet to tell women how foolish they were for choosing the animal and proceeded to limn the consequences they merited for that choice. This at minimum allowed those females who had been hesitating about their decision to decide with renewed assurance.

Portraying the Setup

To Cook a Bear skillfully dramatises this nifty little setup. This six-episode series is based on Swedish author Mikael Niemi’s 2018 novel of the same name (translated two years later for an English audience). It follows the tribulations of a clergyman (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his family when they arrive to begin a new ministry in Kengis, an isolated village in northern Sweden, during the mid-19th century. In a place lacking many joys, none of the inhabitants especially appreciate his strict stance on alcohol and dancing, yet it is his protection of impoverished people – especially the indigenous Sami, from which comes the pastor’s adopted son the youth Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his conviction in social justice and equal rights that places him on a collision course with the Kengis powers that be.

The Opposing Forces

Soon collaborating against him include the lawman Brahe (the performer), the intimidating mill owner the matron Sjödahl (Pernilla August), observed initially firing a newly injured worker with minimal compensation as he remains 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 store owner Lindmark (the actor). However, in fairness, Lindmark’s creepiness pales once itinerant painter Beronius appears on the scene (the performer, providing a performance of exceptional unsettling intensity). While they remain – similar to the clergyman – only a little more than caricatures, they are at least potent archetypes.

Narrative Development

Once the foundations of conflict sown, it is time to get down to narrative business. The maid from the doctor’s house, the character Hilda (the actress), duly goes missing in the forest. Signs of her flight and bear markings on a tree get discovered yet she remains nowhere to be seen. Rumours and anxieties regarding a human-devouring bear prowling the woodland spread, but the pastor holds a different view that he and Jussi embark to verify.

An Odd Beast

This Bear Drama is a slightly odd beast. It creates a strong impression of the desolation that allows suspicion and bias and grim legends thrive from the native legend that bears can be controlled or inhabited by the spirits of men. It avoids idealising the tough existence led by the residents, in which brutality, be it from the wild or mankind, always looms on the edges, waiting to erupt. Yet the personas rarely become beyond symbols – or maybe, as the struggles between justice and vengeance, rationality and faith, virtue and evil intensify, emblematic figures within a moral tale – preventing the entire production fully coming to life.

Stylistic Shifts

Additionally, exist numerous tonally jarring instances in which the clergyman’s skill in finding evidence and discern Hilda’s fate becomes nearly laughable. He positions himself observing broken milk pots and clumps of hair in hay barns like a combined Hercule Poirot and Sherlock Holmes – with Jussi a particularly unfortunate Hastings-cum-Watson (neither of whom had to lick a mixture of blood droplets and saliva from his superior to agree that, yes, it was definitely coagulated blood at the crime scene), before announcing his newest conclusion and extracting a corpse out of a swamp.

Opposing Goals

The local leaders are bent on proving that Hilda met her end by a bear, perhaps to preserve the calm, perhaps to protect a fellow elite. The clergyman is bent on proving the opposite, and the proof so rapidly accumulates supporting his view that again the show’s credibility and the viewer’s patience get strained. At its best, To Cook a Bear is reminiscent of the TV version some years back of the author’s The Essex Serpent, through its portrayal of the opposing attractions and fears presented by rational thought and belief. At its worst, it’s more like a bear-themed police procedural. Nevertheless, it appears to provide the answer to the earlier query: “Females, choose the animal.”

• To Cook a Bear streams on Disney+ now.