To Cook a Bear Analysis: A Daft Historical Crime Drama Resembles Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit

A heated debate lately spread widely on social media, after someone posed the question to women: would you rather be lost in a forest alongside a male or with a bear? Similar to the most engaging thought experiments, it exposed wildly different worldviews and life encounters, illuminated chasms between the sexes, and could easily cause an existential crisis for anyone pondering about it extensively. Additionally, there came the predictable follow-up in which men of a certain stripe took to the internet to tell women how foolish they had been for choosing the bear and went on to limn the punishments they deserved for it. This at least allowed the women who were uncertain over their choice to decide with renewed assurance.

Dramatising the Scenario

The Bear-Cooking Tale skillfully dramatises this nifty small premise. The six-part series is based from Swedish author the novelist’s 2018 book with the identical title (rendered two years later for English readers). It traces the struggles of a clergyman (the lead actor) and his family when they arrive to start a fresh religious post in Kengis, a remote village in northern Sweden, in 1852. Within a community lacking many joys, not one of the inhabitants especially warm to his puritanical stance on drinking and dancing, but it is his defense of the poor – particularly the indigenous Sami, from which comes the pastor’s foster child the youth Jussi (the young actor) – and his belief in societal fairness and equality that sets him on a collision course with the Kengis powers that be.

The Antagonists

Quickly in cahoots against him include the lawman Brahe (the performer), the fearsome mill owner Madam Sjödahl (the actress), seen early on dismissing a recently mangled worker with minimal compensation while he is still babbling upon seeing his crushed hand, and all others who benefit from a populace easily swayed with some containers of the whisky provided by the creepy shopkeeper the merchant Lindmark (the actor). Although, in fairness, Lindmark’s eeriness pales once itinerant painter the artist Beronius appears in the story (the performer, providing a performance of rare discomfiting power). If they are – similar to the clergyman – only a little more than caricatures, they still serve as effective ones.

Plot Progression

Once the foundations of tension planted, the moment arrives to proceed with the storyline. The maid from the doctor’s house, the character Hilda (the actress), duly vanishes from the woods. Indications of her flight and animal scratches upon a trunk are found yet she remains nowhere to be seen. Gossip and anxieties regarding a human-devouring bear prowling the woods spread, yet the clergyman holds a different view that he and Jussi embark to prove.

A Strange Creation

This Bear Drama is a somewhat odd beast. It conjures a fine sense of the bleakness that lets distrust and bias and dark myths flourish from the native legend that animals can be controlled or inhabited by the souls of humans. It avoids romanticise the hardscrabble life experienced by the residents, where violence, be it from the wild or people, lurks constantly at the periphery, poised to explode. But the characters rarely become more than ciphers – or perhaps, as the struggles between justice and revenge, rationality and religion, good and wickedness intensify, representative characters within a moral tale – which stops the whole thing fully coming to life.

Stylistic Shifts

Additionally, there are the many tonally jarring moments where the clergyman’s skill to discover clues and discern the maid’s destiny turns almost risible. He positions himself looking at broken milk pots and strands of fur within storage sheds like a combined Hercule Poirot and Sherlock Holmes – with Jussi a particularly unfortunate Hastings-cum-Watson (neither of whom were required to taste a blend of blood droplets and saliva from his superior to confirm that, yes, it was definitely dried blood at the crime scene), before announcing 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 an animal, perhaps to protect the calm, or possibly to protect one of their own. The pastor is bent on proving the opposite, and the evidence so quickly stacks up in his favour that again the drama’s plausibility and the viewer’s patience are tested. In its finest moments, To Cook a Bear evokes memories of the TV version a few years ago of the author’s The Essex Serpent, through its portrayal of the opposing allures and fears offered by science and religion. At its worst, it resembles Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Nevertheless, it appears to offer the response to the earlier query: “Females, choose the animal.”

• The series is on Disney+ currently.