To Cook a Bear Review: A Silly Period Mystery Is Like Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit

An intense discussion lately spread widely across online platforms, after someone posed the question for females: which would you prefer be lost in the woods with a man or a bear? Similar to the best hypothetical scenarios, it revealed vastly opposing worldviews and life encounters, highlighted chasms between the sexes, and could easily cause an existential crisis if you thought about it for too long. Additionally, there came the predictable follow-up in which some males came online to tell women how stupid they had been to select the animal and proceeded to describe the consequences they deserved for that choice. This at minimum allowed the women who were uncertain about their decision to decide with a new confidence.

Dramatising the Setup

The Bear-Cooking Tale effectively dramatises this nifty small premise. This six-episode drama is adapted on Swedish author Mikael Niemi’s 2018 book of the same name (translated in 2020 for an English audience). It follows the struggles of a pastor (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his family when they arrive to begin a fresh religious post in Kengis, an isolated settlement in Sweden’s north, in 1852. In a place with few pleasures, not one of the locals especially appreciate his puritanical approach to drinking and dancing, yet it is his defense of the poor – especially the native Sami population, from which hails the pastor’s foster child Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his conviction in social justice and equal rights that places him in direct opposition against the Kengis powers that be.

The Opposing Forces

Soon in cahoots opposing him are the sheriff the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the fearsome factory proprietor Madam Sjödahl (Pernilla August), seen early on dismissing a newly injured laborer with a month’s pay while he is still gibbering at the sight of his pulped hand, and all others who profit from a community easily swayed for a few bottles of the whisky sold by the unsettling store owner the merchant Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). However, in fairness, Lindmark’s eeriness diminishes when travelling artist the artist Beronius arrives on the scene (Simon J Berger, delivering an acting turn of rare discomfiting power). While they remain – similar to the clergyman – only a little more than caricatures, they are at least effective ones.

Plot Progression

With the seeds of conflict planted, it is time to proceed to narrative business. The maid employed by the doctor, Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), duly goes missing from the woods. Signs of her escape and bear markings on a tree are found but she is nowhere to be seen. Gossip and anxieties regarding a human-devouring bear roaming the woodland spread, but the pastor holds a different view that he and Jussi embark to verify.

A Strange Creation

To Cook a Bear is a somewhat peculiar show. It conjures a strong impression of the bleakness that lets distrust and bias and grim legends thrive based on local folklore that bears can be controlled or inhabited by the souls of humans. It avoids romanticise the tough existence experienced by the villagers, in which brutality, be it from nature or people, lurks constantly on the edges, waiting to erupt. But the characters rarely become more than ciphers – or maybe, as the struggles between justice and revenge, logic and faith, virtue and evil escalate, representative characters in a fable – preventing the entire production truly coming to life.

Tonal Inconsistencies

Additionally, exist numerous stylistically clashing moments in which the clergyman’s skill in finding evidence and determine the maid’s destiny turns almost risible. He positions himself looking at broken milk pots and strands of fur in hay barns like a combined the Belgian detective the English sleuth – alongside Jussi a rather hapless assistant figure (none of whom were required to taste a blend of blood droplets and the boss’s spit to agree that, yes, it was clearly coagulated blood on the site), before announcing his latest deduction and pulling a corpse from a bog.

Opposing Goals

The village elite are determined proving that Hilda was killed by an animal, perhaps to protect the calm, or possibly to shield a fellow elite. The clergyman is intent on establishing the opposite, and the evidence so quickly accumulates in his favour that once more the drama’s plausibility and the viewer’s patience get strained. At its best, To Cook a Bear evokes memories of the adaptation a few years ago of the author’s the serpent tale, through its portrayal of the opposing attractions and terrors presented by science and belief. At its worst, it’s more like Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Nevertheless, it does seem to offer the response to the earlier query: “Ladies, take the bear.”

• The series is on Disney+ currently.