The Bear Cooking Drama Review: A Daft Historical Crime Drama Resembles Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit

A heated debate lately spread widely on social media, following a user posed the question to women: which would you prefer find yourself stranded in the woods alongside a male or with a bear? Like all the most engaging hypothetical scenarios, it exposed wildly different perspectives and experiences, illuminated chasms between the sexes, and could easily to induce a deep personal dilemma for anyone pondering on it for too long. There was also the predictable follow-up in which some males took to the internet to tell females how foolish they had been for choosing the bear and proceeded to describe the punishments they merited for it. This at minimum enabled the women who had been hesitating over their choice to make it with renewed assurance.

Portraying the Setup

The Bear-Cooking Tale skillfully brings to life this nifty small premise. This six-episode drama is adapted on Scandinavian writer the novelist’s 2018 book of the same name (rendered in 2020 for English readers). It traces the struggles of a clergyman (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his family as they come to start a new ministry within Kengis, a remote village in northern Sweden, in 1852. Within a community with few pleasures, not one of the inhabitants especially warm to his strict approach to drinking and revelry, but it is his defense of impoverished people – especially the native Sami population, from among whom hails the pastor’s foster child Jussi (the young actor) – and his belief in societal fairness and equal rights that sets him on a collision course with the Kengis local authorities.

The Antagonists

Quickly in cahoots against him include the lawman Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the fearsome mill owner the matron Sjödahl (the actress), seen initially firing a newly injured worker with a month’s pay as he remains gibbering upon seeing of his pulped hand, and all others who profit from a populace easily swayed with some containers of the whisky provided by the unsettling shopkeeper the merchant Lindmark (the actor). However, in fairness, Lindmark’s eeriness diminishes when travelling artist Beronius appears in the story (the performer, delivering an acting turn of exceptional unsettling intensity). While they remain – similar to the clergyman – just slightly beyond being stereotypes, they still serve as potent archetypes.

Plot Progression

With the seeds of conflict sown, it is time to get down to narrative business. The servant from the doctor’s house, the character Hilda (the actress), accordingly goes missing from the woods. Signs of her escape and bear markings upon a trunk get discovered yet she remains completely absent. Gossip and anxieties regarding a human-devouring beast roaming the woods circulate, but the pastor holds a different view that he and Jussi embark to prove.

An Odd Beast

This Bear Drama is a slightly odd beast. It conjures a fine sense of the bleakness that allows suspicion and prejudice and grim legends flourish from the native legend that bears might be dominated or possessed by the souls of men. And it doesn’t romanticise the hardscrabble life led by the residents, in which violence, whether that of nature or people, always looms on the edges, poised to explode. Yet the personas seldom evolve more than ciphers – or maybe, while the conflicts amid fairness and vengeance, rationality and religion, good and evil escalate, emblematic figures within a moral tale – which stops the whole thing fully becoming immersive.

Stylistic Shifts

Additionally, there are numerous stylistically clashing moments in which the pastor’s ability to discover clues and discern Hilda’s fate turns almost risible. He stands observing shattered containers and strands of fur within storage sheds like a combined the Belgian detective and Sherlock Holmes – with Jussi a particularly unfortunate assistant figure (none of whom had to lick a mixture of blood spatter and saliva from his superior to confirm that, yes, it was definitely dried blood on the site), before announcing his latest deduction and extracting a body out of a swamp.

Opposing Goals

The village elite are determined demonstrating that the maid met her end by an animal, perhaps to protect the calm, perhaps to protect one of their own. The pastor is bent on proving the opposite, and the evidence so rapidly accumulates supporting his view that once more the drama’s plausibility and the viewer’s patience get strained. In its finest moments, To Cook a Bear is reminiscent of the adaptation some years back of the author’s the serpent tale, through its portrayal of the competing allures and terrors presented by science and religion. At its worst, it resembles Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Still, it does seem to offer the response to the earlier query: “Ladies, take the bear.”

• The series is on Disney+ now.