To Cook a Bear Analysis: This Daft Historical Crime Drama Is Like Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit

A intense debate lately went viral across online platforms, following someone asked a query to women: which would you prefer find yourself stranded in the woods alongside a male or a bear? Like all the most engaging hypothetical scenarios, it exposed wildly different perspectives and experiences, highlighted chasms among genders, and could easily to induce a deep personal dilemma if you thought on it for too long. There was also the predictable follow-up where some males came online to inform women how stupid they had been to select the animal and went on to limn the punishments they merited for it. This at least enabled the women who were uncertain about their decision to decide with renewed assurance.

Dramatising the Scenario

The Bear-Cooking Tale effectively brings to life this clever little setup. The six-part drama is adapted on Scandinavian writer the novelist’s 2018 novel with the identical title (translated in 2020 for an English audience). It traces the tribulations of a clergyman (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his household as they come to begin a fresh religious post within Kengis, a remote settlement in northern Sweden, in 1852. In a place with few pleasures, none of the inhabitants especially appreciate his puritanical stance on alcohol and revelry, yet it is his protection of impoverished people – especially the indigenous Sami, from which hails the preacher’s adopted son Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his conviction in societal fairness and equality that places him in direct opposition against the Kengis powers that be.

The Opposing Forces

Soon in cahoots opposing him are the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the intimidating mill owner the matron Sjödahl (Pernilla August), seen early on firing a recently mangled laborer with minimal compensation as he remains gibbering at the sight of his pulped hand, and all others who benefit from a populace who can be bought with some containers of liquor provided by the unsettling shopkeeper Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). However, in fairness, Lindmark’s eeriness pales once itinerant painter the artist Beronius appears in the story (Simon J Berger, providing a performance of exceptional discomfiting power). While they remain – like the pastor himself – only a little more being stereotypes, they still serve as potent archetypes.

Narrative Development

With the seeds of conflict planted, the moment arrives to proceed with the storyline. The maid employed by the doctor, Hilda (the actress), accordingly vanishes from the woods. Signs of her flight and animal scratches on a tree get discovered yet she remains completely absent. Rumours and fears regarding a human-devouring beast roaming the woodland circulate, but the pastor holds a different view that he and Jussi set out to verify.

A Strange Creation

This Bear Drama is a somewhat odd beast. It conjures a strong impression of the bleakness that lets suspicion and prejudice and dark myths flourish based on local folklore that bears might be dominated or possessed by the souls of men. It avoids romanticise the hardscrabble life experienced by the residents, in which brutality, be it from nature or mankind, always looms on the edges, waiting to erupt. But the characters seldom evolve beyond symbols – or maybe, as the struggles amid fairness and vengeance, rationality and faith, good and evil escalate, representative characters within a moral tale – which stops the entire production fully becoming immersive.

Tonal Inconsistencies

Additionally, there are the many tonally jarring moments where the pastor’s ability to discover clues and determine Hilda’s fate becomes almost risible. He positions himself observing shattered containers and clumps of hair in hay barns as a fusion of Hercule Poirot and Sherlock Holmes – alongside Jussi a rather hapless assistant figure (none of whom had to lick a mixture of blood droplets and saliva from his superior to confirm that, yes, it was clearly coagulated blood at the crime scene), prior to declaring his newest conclusion and pulling a body from a bog.

Opposing Goals

The local leaders are determined proving that Hilda was killed by a bear, maybe to protect the peace, or possibly to shield one of their own. The pastor is bent on proving the opposite, and the proof so rapidly stacks up in his favour that again the show’s credibility and the viewer’s patience get strained. In its finest moments, the series is reminiscent of the TV version some years back of the author’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the competing attractions and terrors presented by rational thought and religion. In its low points, it’s more like a bear-themed police procedural. Nevertheless, it does seem to provide the response to that debated question: “Females, choose the animal.”

• To Cook a Bear streams on Disney+ now.