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

A heated debate recently spread widely on social media, after someone posed the question for females: would you rather be lost in the woods alongside a male or with a bear? Similar to the best hypothetical scenarios, it exposed vastly opposing perspectives and experiences, illuminated chasms between the sexes, and could easily to induce a deep personal dilemma for anyone pondering about it for too long. There was also the almost inevitable follow-up where some males took to the internet to tell females how stupid they were to select the bear and proceeded to limn the punishments they deserved for it. This at minimum enabled those females who were uncertain over their choice to make it with renewed assurance.

Portraying the Setup

The Bear-Cooking Tale effectively brings to life this clever small premise. This six-episode series is adapted on Swedish author Mikael Niemi’s 2018 book of the same name (rendered in 2020 for an English audience). It traces the tribulations of a pastor (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his family as they come to begin a new ministry within Kengis, a remote village in northern Sweden, during the mid-19th century. In a place lacking many joys, not one of the inhabitants particularly warm to his strict stance on drinking and dancing, yet it is his defense of impoverished people – particularly the native Sami population, from which comes the pastor’s adopted son Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in societal fairness and equality that sets him in direct opposition with the Kengis local authorities.

The Opposing Forces

Quickly collaborating against him include the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the intimidating factory proprietor the matron Sjödahl (the actress), observed early on dismissing a recently mangled worker with a month’s pay as he remains gibbering at the sight his crushed hand, and all others who profit from a populace easily swayed with some containers of liquor provided by the unsettling shopkeeper the merchant Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s eeriness pales when itinerant painter the artist Beronius arrives on the scene (the performer, delivering an acting turn of rare discomfiting power). If they are – similar to the clergyman – only a little more being stereotypes, they are at least effective ones.

Narrative Development

Once the foundations of conflict planted, the moment arrives to proceed to narrative business. The maid from the doctor’s house, the character Hilda (the actress), accordingly vanishes from the woods. Indications of her flight and animal scratches on a tree are found yet she remains nowhere to be seen. Gossip and fears regarding a human-devouring bear roaming the woodland spread, but the pastor holds a different view that he and Jussi embark to verify.

An Odd Beast

To Cook a Bear is a somewhat odd beast. It conjures a fine sense of the desolation that allows suspicion and prejudice and grim legends thrive from the native legend that bears might be dominated or possessed by the spirits of men. It avoids idealising the hardscrabble life led by the villagers, in which brutality, whether that of the wild or mankind, always looms on the edges, waiting to erupt. But the characters rarely become beyond symbols – or maybe, while the conflicts between justice and vengeance, logic and faith, good and wickedness intensify, emblematic figures within a moral tale – preventing the entire production truly becoming immersive.

Stylistic Shifts

And then, there are the many stylistically clashing moments where the pastor’s ability to discover clues and discern Hilda’s fate becomes nearly laughable. He stands looking at broken milk pots and strands of fur in hay barns as a fusion of the Belgian detective the English sleuth – alongside Jussi a rather hapless Hastings-cum-Watson (neither of whom had to lick a mixture of blood droplets and the boss’s spit to agree that, yes, it was definitely dried blood on the site), prior to declaring his newest conclusion and extracting a body from a bog.

Clashing Agendas

The village elite are determined proving that Hilda met her end by a bear, maybe to preserve the calm, perhaps to protect a fellow elite. The pastor is intent on proving the opposite, and the evidence so quickly accumulates in his favour that once more the show’s credibility and the viewer’s patience are tested. At its best, To Cook a Bear evokes memories of the TV version a few years ago of Sarah Perry’s the serpent tale, through its portrayal of the competing attractions and fears offered by science and belief. In its low points, it’s more like a bear-themed police procedural. Still, it does seem to provide the response to the earlier query: “Females, choose the animal.”

• The series streams on Disney+ currently.