The Bear Cooking Drama Analysis: This Silly Historical Crime Drama Resembles A Bear-Focused Detective Series

An intense debate lately went viral across online platforms, after someone posed the question for females: would you rather be lost in a forest with a man or a bear? Like all the most engaging hypothetical scenarios, it exposed vastly opposing worldviews and life encounters, highlighted chasms among genders, and was likely cause an existential crisis if you thought about it for too long. Additionally, there came the almost inevitable coda where men of a certain stripe came online to tell women how stupid they had been to select the bear and proceeded to describe the punishments they deserved for it. This at least allowed the women who had been hesitating about their decision to make it with renewed assurance.

Portraying the Setup

The Bear-Cooking Tale effectively brings to life this clever little setup. The six-part series is based from Scandinavian writer Mikael Niemi’s 2018 book of the same name (rendered in 2020 for English readers). It traces the tribulations of a clergyman (the lead actor) and his family as they come to begin a fresh religious post within Kengis, an isolated village in Sweden’s north, in 1852. Within a community lacking many joys, none of the locals especially appreciate his puritanical approach to alcohol and revelry, but it is his defense of the poor – especially the native Sami population, from among whom comes the pastor’s foster child Jussi (the young actor) – and his belief in societal fairness and equality that places him in direct opposition against the Kengis powers that be.

The Antagonists

Soon collaborating opposing him include the lawman the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the fearsome mill owner the matron Sjödahl (Pernilla August), observed early on dismissing a recently mangled worker 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 with some containers of the whisky provided by the unsettling store owner Lindmark (the actor). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s eeriness pales when travelling artist the artist Beronius appears on the scene (Simon J Berger, providing an acting turn of exceptional unsettling intensity). If they are – similar to the clergyman – only a little more than caricatures, they still serve as potent archetypes.

Narrative Development

Once the foundations of tension planted, the moment arrives to get down to narrative business. The maid employed by the doctor, Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), duly vanishes from the woods. Indications of her escape and animal scratches upon a trunk get discovered yet she remains completely absent. Rumours and fears regarding a human-devouring bear roaming the woodland spread, yet the clergyman holds a different view which he and his ward embark to verify.

An Odd Beast

To Cook a Bear is a somewhat peculiar show. It conjures a strong impression of the desolation that allows suspicion and bias and grim legends flourish from the native legend that animals can be controlled or inhabited by the souls of men. And it doesn’t romanticise the hardscrabble life experienced by the residents, in which violence, be it from the wild or mankind, lurks constantly at the periphery, poised to explode. But the characters rarely become more than ciphers – or maybe, as the struggles between justice and vengeance, rationality and religion, good and wickedness intensify, representative characters in a fable – which stops the whole thing truly coming to life.

Stylistic Shifts

Additionally, exist the many tonally jarring moments in which the pastor’s ability to discover clues and determine Hilda’s fate turns nearly laughable. He stands looking at broken milk pots and strands of fur within storage sheds like a combined Hercule Poirot the English sleuth – with Jussi a rather hapless assistant figure (neither of whom had to taste a mixture of blood spatter and the boss’s spit to confirm that, yes, it was clearly coagulated blood at the crime scene), before announcing his newest conclusion and pulling a corpse from a bog.

Opposing Goals

The village elite are bent on proving that the maid met her end by an animal, perhaps to protect the calm, perhaps to shield a fellow elite. The pastor is bent on establishing the opposite, and the proof so quickly accumulates supporting his view that once more the show’s credibility and audience tolerance are tested. At its best, the series evokes memories of the adaptation some years back of the author’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the competing allures and fears offered by science and belief. At its worst, it’s more like a bear-themed police procedural. Nevertheless, it appears to provide the answer to the earlier query: “Females, choose the animal.”

• To Cook a Bear is on Disney+ currently.