The Bear Cooking Drama Review: A Silly Period Mystery Is Like Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit

An intense discussion lately spread widely on social media, following someone posed the question for females: which would you prefer find yourself stranded in a forest alongside a male or a bear? Like all the most engaging hypothetical scenarios, it exposed wildly different perspectives and experiences, highlighted chasms between the sexes, and was likely to induce an existential crisis if you thought on it for too long. Additionally, there came the predictable follow-up where men of a certain stripe took to the internet to tell females how stupid they were to select the animal and proceeded to describe the punishments they merited for it. This at least enabled those females who had been hesitating about their decision to make it with a new confidence.

Portraying the Scenario

To Cook a Bear skillfully brings to life this nifty small premise. This six-episode series is adapted on Swedish author Mikael Niemi’s 2018 book with the identical title (translated two years later for English readers). It follows the tribulations of a clergyman (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his family when they arrive to begin a new ministry within Kengis, a remote village in Sweden’s north, in 1852. In a place lacking many joys, not one of the locals especially appreciate his puritanical stance on drinking and revelry, yet it is his protection of the poor – particularly the native Sami population, from which comes the pastor’s foster child the youth Jussi (the young actor) – and his conviction in societal fairness and equal rights that places him on a collision course with the Kengis powers that be.

The Opposing Forces

Quickly collaborating against him are the lawman Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the fearsome mill owner the matron Sjödahl (Pernilla August), observed initially dismissing a recently mangled worker with a month’s pay as he remains babbling at the sight of his pulped hand, and all others who profit from a populace who can be bought for a few bottles of liquor provided by the unsettling shopkeeper the merchant Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s creepiness diminishes once travelling artist Beronius appears on the scene (Simon J Berger, delivering a performance of exceptional discomfiting power). If they are – like the pastor himself – only a little more being stereotypes, they are at least potent archetypes.

Narrative Development

With the seeds of conflict sown, the moment arrives to get down to narrative business. The maid employed by the doctor, the character Hilda (the actress), duly goes missing in the forest. Indications of her flight and animal scratches upon a trunk get discovered yet she remains nowhere to be seen. Rumours and fears of a man/maid-eating bear prowling the woods spread, but the pastor has another theory that he and Jussi embark to verify.

An Odd Beast

This Bear Drama is a slightly odd beast. It creates a fine sense of the bleakness that allows suspicion and prejudice and dark myths flourish based on local folklore that animals might be dominated or possessed by the souls of humans. And it doesn’t idealising the tough existence experienced by the residents, in which brutality, whether that of nature or mankind, lurks constantly on the edges, poised to explode. Yet the personas rarely become beyond symbols – or maybe, as the struggles amid fairness and vengeance, logic and religion, virtue and wickedness escalate, emblematic figures in a fable – which stops the entire production fully becoming immersive.

Tonal Inconsistencies

And then, exist numerous stylistically clashing instances in which the clergyman’s skill in finding evidence and discern the maid’s destiny turns almost risible. He stands looking at shattered containers and clumps of hair in hay barns as a fusion of the Belgian detective the English sleuth – alongside Jussi a particularly unfortunate Hastings-cum-Watson (neither of whom had to taste a mixture of blood spatter and saliva from his superior to confirm that, yes, it was definitely dried blood on the site), prior to declaring his latest deduction and extracting a body from a bog.

Clashing Agendas

The local leaders are bent on proving that the maid met her end by a bear, maybe to preserve the calm, perhaps to protect a fellow elite. The clergyman is intent on proving otherwise, and the evidence so quickly accumulates supporting his view that again the drama’s plausibility and audience tolerance are tested. At its best, the series is reminiscent of the TV version a few years ago of Sarah Perry’s the serpent tale, with its evocation of the opposing allures and fears offered by rational thought and belief. In its low points, it’s more like Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Still, it appears to offer the response to the earlier query: “Females, choose the animal.”

• To Cook a Bear streams on Disney+ now.