The Bear Cooking Drama Analysis: A Daft Historical Crime Drama Is Like Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit

An intense debate lately went viral across online platforms, after a user posed the question for females: would you rather find yourself stranded in the woods with a man or with a bear? Like all the most engaging hypothetical scenarios, it exposed wildly different perspectives and experiences, illuminated chasms between the sexes, and was likely cause a deep personal dilemma if you thought on it extensively. There was also the almost inevitable coda in which some males took to the internet to inform females how stupid they had been for choosing the bear and went on to describe the punishments they merited for it. This at least enabled those females who were uncertain about their decision to make it with a new confidence.

Portraying the Setup

The Bear-Cooking Tale skillfully brings to life this nifty small premise. The six-part series is based on Scandinavian writer the novelist’s 2018 novel with the identical title (rendered two years later for an English audience). It traces the tribulations of a clergyman (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his family as they come to start a new ministry in Kengis, a remote village in northern Sweden, during the mid-19th century. Within a community with few pleasures, none of the inhabitants especially warm to his strict stance on alcohol and revelry, but it is his protection of the poor – particularly the native Sami population, from which comes the pastor’s foster child Jussi (the young actor) – and his conviction in social justice and equality that places him on a collision course against the Kengis powers that be.

The Antagonists

Soon in cahoots against him are the lawman the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), 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 at the sight of his pulped hand, and anyone else who profit from a populace easily swayed with some containers of the whisky provided by the unsettling store owner the merchant Lindmark (the actor). However, in fairness, Lindmark’s eeriness pales once travelling artist Beronius arrives in the story (the performer, delivering an acting turn of exceptional discomfiting power). If they are – like the pastor himself – only a little more being stereotypes, they still serve as effective ones.

Plot Progression

With the seeds of conflict planted, it is time to get down to narrative business. The maid employed by the doctor, the character Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), duly goes missing from the woods. Signs of her escape and bear markings on a tree get discovered yet she remains completely absent. Gossip and fears of a man/maid-eating bear prowling the woods spread, yet the clergyman has another theory that he and Jussi set out to verify.

An Odd Beast

This Bear Drama is a somewhat odd beast. It creates a strong impression of the desolation that allows distrust and bias and dark myths thrive from the native legend that animals might be dominated or inhabited by the spirits of men. It avoids romanticise the tough existence led by the residents, in which brutality, be it from nature or people, always looms at the periphery, waiting to erupt. But the characters seldom evolve beyond symbols – or perhaps, as the struggles amid fairness and revenge, rationality and faith, good and wickedness escalate, representative characters in a fable – preventing the whole thing fully becoming immersive.

Stylistic Shifts

And then, there are the many stylistically clashing moments in which the clergyman’s skill in finding evidence and discern Hilda’s fate becomes almost risible. He positions himself observing broken milk pots and strands of fur within storage sheds like a combined the Belgian detective the English sleuth – alongside Jussi a particularly unfortunate Hastings-cum-Watson (neither of whom were required to taste a mixture of blood spatter and the boss’s spit to confirm that, yes, it was definitely coagulated blood on the site), prior to declaring his newest conclusion and pulling a corpse out of a swamp.

Clashing Agendas

The local leaders are bent on demonstrating that Hilda met her end by an animal, perhaps to preserve the peace, or possibly to shield one of their own. The pastor is intent on proving the opposite, and the evidence so quickly accumulates in his favour that again the show’s credibility and the viewer’s patience get strained. At its best, the series is reminiscent of the adaptation a few years ago of the author’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the competing attractions and fears offered by rational thought and belief. In its low points, it’s more like Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Still, it does seem to offer the answer to that debated question: “Females, choose the animal.”

• To Cook a Bear streams on Disney+ now.