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

An heated discussion lately went viral across online platforms, following someone asked the question for females: would you rather find yourself stranded in the woods alongside a male or with a bear? Similar to the best thought experiments, it exposed vastly opposing perspectives and life encounters, illuminated divides among genders, and was likely cause an existential crisis for anyone pondering about it extensively. There was also the almost inevitable coda where some males took to the internet to inform females how foolish they were for choosing the bear and proceeded to describe the consequences they merited for that choice. This at minimum enabled the women who had been hesitating about their decision to make it with a new confidence.

Portraying the Scenario

The Bear-Cooking Tale skillfully brings to life this nifty little setup. This six-episode drama is adapted from Swedish author the novelist’s 2018 novel with the identical title (rendered in 2020 for an English audience). It traces the tribulations of a clergyman (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his family as they come to start a fresh religious post within Kengis, an isolated settlement in Sweden’s north, during the mid-19th century. Within a community with few pleasures, none of the locals particularly appreciate his strict stance on drinking and revelry, but it is his protection of impoverished people – especially the native Sami population, from which comes the pastor’s adopted son Jussi (the young actor) – and his conviction in societal fairness and equality that sets him on a collision course with the Kengis powers that be.

The Antagonists

Quickly in cahoots opposing him include the lawman Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the intimidating factory proprietor the matron Sjödahl (the actress), observed early on dismissing a recently mangled laborer with a month’s pay as he remains babbling upon seeing his crushed hand, and anyone else who benefit from a community easily swayed for a few bottles of liquor provided by the creepy shopkeeper the merchant Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). Although, to be fair, Lindmark’s creepiness diminishes once travelling artist Beronius appears on the scene (Simon J Berger, providing a performance of exceptional unsettling intensity). While they remain – similar to the clergyman – only a little more being stereotypes, they still serve as effective ones.

Narrative Development

Once the foundations of tension sown, the moment arrives to proceed with the storyline. The maid employed by the doctor, the character Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), accordingly goes missing from the woods. Indications of her flight and bear markings on a tree get discovered yet she remains completely absent. Rumours and fears of a man/maid-eating beast prowling the woods spread, yet the clergyman has another theory which he and his ward set out to prove.

An Odd Beast

To Cook a Bear is a somewhat odd beast. It conjures a fine sense of the bleakness that lets distrust and prejudice and grim legends thrive from the native legend that bears can be controlled or inhabited by the souls of men. And it doesn’t idealising the hardscrabble life led by the residents, in which brutality, be it from nature or mankind, always looms at the periphery, waiting to erupt. But the characters rarely become more than ciphers – or perhaps, as the struggles amid fairness and revenge, logic and faith, virtue and evil escalate, emblematic figures in a fable – preventing the whole thing truly coming to life.

Tonal Inconsistencies

Additionally, there are numerous stylistically clashing instances in which the pastor’s ability to discover clues and discern the maid’s destiny turns almost risible. He stands looking at broken milk pots and clumps of hair in hay barns as a fusion of 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 confirm that indeed, it was clearly coagulated blood at the crime scene), before announcing his latest deduction and extracting a corpse from a bog.

Clashing Agendas

The village elite are determined demonstrating that Hilda was killed by an animal, perhaps to preserve the calm, perhaps to protect one of their own. The pastor is intent on establishing the opposite, and the evidence so quickly stacks up supporting his view that again the show’s credibility and audience tolerance get strained. At its best, the series is reminiscent of the adaptation a few years ago of Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, through its portrayal of the competing allures and terrors presented by science and religion. At its worst, it’s more like a bear-themed police procedural. Nevertheless, it appears to provide the answer to that debated question: “Ladies, take the bear.”

• The series is on Disney+ currently.