The Bear Cooking Drama Analysis: This Daft Historical Crime Drama Resembles A Bear-Focused Detective Series

A intense debate recently spread widely across online platforms, after someone posed the question for females: would you rather find yourself stranded in a forest alongside a male or with a bear? Like all the most engaging hypothetical scenarios, it revealed vastly opposing perspectives and life encounters, illuminated divides between the sexes, and was likely cause an existential crisis if you thought about it for too long. Additionally, there came the almost inevitable coda where men of a certain stripe came online to inform women how stupid they had been to select the bear and proceeded to limn the consequences they merited for it. This at least enabled the women who were uncertain over their choice to decide with renewed assurance.

Portraying the Setup

The Bear-Cooking Tale skillfully dramatises this clever small premise. The six-part drama is adapted on Swedish author the novelist’s 2018 novel of the same name (rendered two years later for an English audience). It traces the tribulations of a clergyman (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his family when they arrive to begin a fresh religious post within Kengis, an isolated village in Sweden’s north, during the mid-19th century. Within a community with few pleasures, none of the inhabitants particularly warm to his puritanical stance on alcohol and dancing, but it is his protection of impoverished people – especially the indigenous Sami, from among whom hails the preacher’s adopted son Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in societal fairness and equal rights that places him in direct opposition against the Kengis powers that be.

The Antagonists

Quickly in cahoots opposing him include the lawman the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the fearsome mill owner the matron Sjödahl (Pernilla August), seen initially firing a newly injured worker with minimal compensation as he remains gibbering upon seeing of his pulped hand, and all others who benefit from a populace who can be bought with some containers of the whisky sold by the unsettling shopkeeper the merchant Lindmark (the actor). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s creepiness pales when travelling artist Beronius arrives on the scene (Simon J Berger, providing an acting turn of exceptional discomfiting power). While they remain – like the pastor himself – only a little more than caricatures, they are at least effective ones.

Plot Progression

With the seeds of tension sown, it is time to get down with the storyline. The maid from the doctor’s house, Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), accordingly goes missing in the forest. Indications of her escape and bear markings on a tree get discovered but she is completely absent. Gossip and anxieties of a man/maid-eating bear prowling the woods circulate, but the pastor holds a different view which he and his ward set out to verify.

A Strange Creation

To Cook a Bear is a slightly peculiar show. It conjures a strong impression of the bleakness that allows distrust and bias and dark myths flourish from the native legend that animals might be dominated or inhabited by the souls of humans. And it doesn’t idealising the hardscrabble life led by the villagers, in which violence, be it from the wild or people, always looms on the edges, waiting to erupt. Yet the personas rarely become beyond symbols – or maybe, as the struggles between justice and revenge, rationality and faith, virtue and evil intensify, representative characters within a moral tale – which stops the whole thing truly becoming immersive.

Tonal Inconsistencies

And then, exist numerous tonally jarring moments where the clergyman’s skill in finding evidence and determine Hilda’s fate turns nearly laughable. He positions himself looking at broken milk pots and strands of fur within storage sheds as a fusion of Hercule Poirot the English sleuth – with Jussi a rather hapless assistant figure (neither of whom had to taste a mixture of blood droplets and saliva from his superior to confirm that, yes, it was clearly dried blood at the crime scene), before announcing his newest conclusion and extracting a body from a bog.

Opposing Goals

The village elite are bent on demonstrating that Hilda was killed by an animal, maybe to protect the calm, or possibly to shield a fellow elite. The pastor is bent on proving the opposite, and the evidence so quickly 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 is reminiscent of the adaptation some years back of Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the opposing allures and fears offered by science and belief. At its worst, it’s more like Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Still, it does seem to provide the response to the earlier query: “Females, choose the animal.”

• The series streams on Disney+ now.