The Bear Cooking Drama Review: A Daft Historical Crime Drama Is Like A Bear-Focused Detective Series

A heated debate lately went viral on social media, following a user asked the question to women: which would you prefer be lost in a forest alongside a male or a bear? Like all the best hypothetical scenarios, it exposed wildly different worldviews and life encounters, highlighted divides among genders, and was likely to induce an existential crisis for anyone pondering about it for too long. Additionally, there came the predictable coda where men of a certain stripe came online to tell females how stupid they had been for choosing the animal and went on to describe the consequences they deserved for that choice. This at minimum allowed those females who had been hesitating over their choice to make it with renewed assurance.

Portraying the Scenario

The Bear-Cooking Tale effectively dramatises this clever small premise. This six-episode drama is adapted from Scandinavian writer the novelist’s 2018 book of the same name (rendered in 2020 for an English audience). It traces the tribulations of a clergyman (the lead actor) and his family as they come to start a fresh religious post within Kengis, an isolated village in Sweden’s north, during the mid-19th century. In a place with few pleasures, not one of the inhabitants especially warm to his strict approach to alcohol and dancing, yet it is his defense of impoverished people – especially the native Sami population, from which hails the pastor’s foster child the youth 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 Opposing Forces

Quickly in cahoots against him include the lawman Brahe (the performer), the intimidating mill owner Madam Sjödahl (the actress), observed initially firing a newly injured laborer with minimal compensation as he remains babbling upon seeing his crushed hand, and anyone else who benefit from a community who can be bought for a few bottles of liquor provided by the unsettling shopkeeper Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s eeriness pales when itinerant painter Beronius appears on the scene (Simon J Berger, providing a performance of exceptional unsettling intensity). If they are – similar to the clergyman – only a little more than caricatures, they are at least potent archetypes.

Narrative Development

With the seeds of conflict planted, it is time to proceed with the storyline. The servant from the doctor’s house, the character Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), accordingly goes missing in the forest. Signs of her escape and animal scratches on a tree are found but she is nowhere to be seen. Rumours and fears of a man/maid-eating beast roaming the woods spread, yet the clergyman holds a different view which he and his ward embark to verify.

A Strange Creation

This Bear Drama is a slightly peculiar show. It conjures a fine sense of the bleakness that allows suspicion and prejudice and dark myths thrive based on local folklore that animals might be dominated or possessed by the spirits of men. It avoids idealising the tough existence experienced by the villagers, where violence, whether that of nature or mankind, always looms at the periphery, waiting to erupt. Yet the personas seldom evolve beyond symbols – or maybe, as the struggles amid fairness and revenge, logic and religion, virtue and wickedness escalate, emblematic figures within a moral tale – preventing the whole thing truly coming to life.

Tonal Inconsistencies

Additionally, there are the many stylistically clashing instances where the clergyman’s skill to discover clues and discern Hilda’s fate turns almost risible. He positions himself looking at broken milk pots and clumps of hair within storage sheds as a fusion of Hercule Poirot the English sleuth – alongside Jussi a particularly unfortunate assistant figure (neither of whom had to lick a mixture of blood droplets and saliva from his superior to agree that indeed, it was clearly coagulated blood on the site), before announcing his latest deduction and pulling a corpse out of a swamp.

Opposing Goals

The village elite are bent on demonstrating that the maid was killed by an animal, maybe to protect the calm, or possibly to protect one of their own. The pastor is bent on establishing the opposite, and the evidence so quickly stacks up supporting his view that once more the drama’s plausibility and audience tolerance get strained. At its best, the series is reminiscent of the TV version some years back of the author’s The Essex Serpent, through its portrayal of the competing attractions and terrors presented by rational thought and religion. In its low points, it resembles Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Nevertheless, it does seem to offer the answer to that debated question: “Ladies, take the bear.”

• To Cook a Bear streams on Disney+ now.