The Bear Cooking Drama Analysis: This Daft Period Mystery Is Like Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit

An intense debate recently went viral across online platforms, after someone asked a query for females: would you rather be lost in the woods with a man or with a bear? Like all the best thought experiments, it revealed vastly opposing perspectives and experiences, highlighted chasms among genders, and could easily cause a deep personal dilemma if you thought on it for too long. Additionally, there came the almost inevitable coda in which men of a certain stripe came online to tell females how stupid they were for choosing the animal and went on to describe the consequences they merited for that choice. This at least enabled those females who had been hesitating over their choice to make it with renewed assurance.

Dramatising the Setup

The Bear-Cooking Tale skillfully brings to life this nifty little setup. This six-episode drama is based from Scandinavian writer Mikael Niemi’s 2018 novel with the identical title (translated in 2020 for an English audience). It traces the struggles of a clergyman (the lead actor) and his household when they arrive to start a fresh religious post within Kengis, an isolated settlement in northern Sweden, in 1852. In a place lacking many joys, none of the inhabitants particularly warm to his strict approach to alcohol and revelry, but it is his defense of impoverished people – particularly the native Sami population, from which comes the pastor’s foster child Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his conviction in social justice and equal rights that places him in direct opposition with the Kengis powers that be.

The Opposing Forces

Soon in cahoots opposing him are the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the intimidating factory proprietor the matron Sjödahl (Pernilla August), seen early on firing a recently mangled laborer with a month’s pay while he is still gibbering upon seeing of his pulped hand, and all others who benefit from a community easily swayed for a few bottles of the whisky provided by the creepy store owner the merchant Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). Although, in fairness, Lindmark’s eeriness pales when travelling artist the artist Beronius appears in the story (Simon J Berger, providing a performance of exceptional discomfiting power). While they remain – like the pastor himself – just slightly beyond being stereotypes, they still serve as potent archetypes.

Plot Progression

Once the foundations of tension planted, the moment arrives to get down with the storyline. The servant employed by the doctor, the character Hilda (the actress), duly vanishes in the forest. Signs of her flight and animal scratches upon a trunk are found yet she remains nowhere to be seen. Gossip and fears regarding a human-devouring beast roaming the woodland spread, yet the clergyman holds a different view which he and his ward set out to verify.

An Odd Beast

To Cook a Bear is a slightly odd beast. It creates a strong impression of the desolation that allows distrust and prejudice and dark myths flourish from the native legend that animals can be controlled or possessed by the spirits of men. And it doesn’t idealising the tough existence led by the residents, in which violence, whether that of nature or people, lurks constantly at the periphery, poised to explode. Yet the personas seldom evolve more than ciphers – or perhaps, as the struggles amid fairness and vengeance, logic and religion, good and wickedness escalate, emblematic figures within a moral tale – which stops the whole thing fully becoming immersive.

Stylistic Shifts

Additionally, there are numerous stylistically clashing moments where the clergyman’s skill to discover clues and discern the maid’s destiny becomes nearly laughable. He stands looking at broken milk pots and clumps of hair in hay barns like a combined Hercule Poirot the English sleuth – alongside Jussi a particularly unfortunate assistant figure (none of whom had to taste a blend of blood spatter and the boss’s spit to confirm that indeed, it was definitely coagulated blood on the site), prior to declaring his newest conclusion and pulling a body from a bog.

Opposing Goals

The local leaders are bent on demonstrating that the maid was killed by an animal, perhaps to protect the peace, or possibly to shield a fellow elite. The pastor is intent on establishing the opposite, and the proof so quickly stacks up in his favour that once more the drama’s plausibility and the viewer’s patience get strained. At its best, the series is reminiscent of the TV version some years back of Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the competing allures and terrors offered by rational thought and religion. At its worst, it’s more like a bear-themed police procedural. Still, it does seem to provide the answer to that debated question: “Ladies, take the bear.”

• To Cook a Bear is on Disney+ now.