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

An heated debate lately went viral on social media, following a user posed the question for females: would you rather find yourself stranded in the woods with a man or a bear? Similar to the best hypothetical scenarios, it revealed wildly different worldviews and life encounters, highlighted chasms among genders, and was likely cause an existential crisis for anyone pondering on it for too long. Additionally, there came the almost inevitable follow-up in which some males took to the internet to inform women how stupid they were for choosing the bear and went on to describe the punishments they merited for it. This at minimum enabled the women who had been hesitating about their decision to make it with renewed assurance.

Dramatising the Setup

To Cook a Bear skillfully dramatises this clever small premise. This six-episode series is based from Swedish author Mikael Niemi’s 2018 novel of the same name (rendered in 2020 for an English audience). It follows the tribulations of a pastor (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his family as they come to start a fresh religious post within Kengis, an isolated settlement in northern Sweden, in 1852. In a place with few pleasures, not one of the inhabitants especially 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 foster child the youth 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 collaborating opposing him include the lawman the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the fearsome mill owner Madam Sjödahl (Pernilla August), seen initially dismissing a newly injured laborer with a month’s pay as he remains babbling upon seeing his crushed hand, and anyone else who benefit from a populace easily swayed with some containers of the whisky sold by the unsettling shopkeeper Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s creepiness pales when travelling artist Beronius appears on the scene (the performer, providing an acting turn of rare discomfiting power). While they remain – similar to the clergyman – just slightly beyond being stereotypes, they still serve as potent archetypes.

Narrative Development

With the seeds of tension sown, the moment arrives to get down with the storyline. The servant from the doctor’s house, Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), duly vanishes in the forest. Indications of her escape and animal scratches upon a trunk are found yet she remains nowhere to be seen. Rumours and fears of a man/maid-eating beast prowling the woodland circulate, but the pastor holds a different view which he and his ward set out to prove.

An Odd Beast

This Bear Drama is a slightly odd beast. It creates a fine sense of the bleakness that allows suspicion and bias and grim legends flourish from the native legend that animals can be controlled or possessed by the spirits of men. And it doesn’t romanticise the hardscrabble life experienced by the residents, where violence, whether that of the wild or mankind, lurks constantly at the periphery, waiting to erupt. But the characters rarely become more than ciphers – or perhaps, while the conflicts between justice and revenge, rationality and religion, virtue and wickedness intensify, representative characters within a moral tale – preventing the whole thing truly becoming immersive.

Tonal Inconsistencies

And then, there are numerous tonally jarring moments in which the pastor’s ability in finding evidence and discern the maid’s destiny turns nearly laughable. He stands observing shattered containers and clumps of hair in hay barns as a fusion of Hercule Poirot and Sherlock Holmes – with Jussi a particularly unfortunate assistant figure (neither of whom had to lick a blend of blood spatter and the boss’s spit to agree that indeed, it was clearly dried blood at the crime scene), prior to declaring his latest deduction and extracting a corpse from a bog.

Opposing Goals

The village elite are bent on demonstrating that the maid was killed by an animal, perhaps to preserve the peace, perhaps to shield a fellow elite. The clergyman is bent on proving the opposite, and the evidence so rapidly accumulates supporting his view 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 a few years ago of the author’s The Essex Serpent, through its portrayal of the competing allures and fears offered by rational thought and religion. At its worst, it’s more like Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Still, it appears to provide the answer to the earlier query: “Ladies, take the bear.”

• The series is on Disney+ now.