The Bear Cooking Drama Analysis: A Silly Historical Crime Drama Is Like A Bear-Focused Detective Series

A heated debate lately spread widely across online platforms, following someone posed a query for females: would you rather find yourself stranded in a forest with a man or with a bear? Similar to the most engaging thought experiments, it revealed vastly opposing worldviews and life encounters, illuminated chasms among genders, and could easily cause a deep personal dilemma for anyone pondering on it for too long. There was also the predictable coda in which some males took to the internet to inform women how stupid they were to select the animal and went on to describe the punishments they merited for that choice. This at minimum enabled those females who had been hesitating over their choice to decide with renewed assurance.

Dramatising the Setup

To Cook a Bear effectively dramatises this clever little setup. This six-episode series is adapted on Swedish author the novelist’s 2018 novel with the identical title (translated two years later for English readers). It follows the tribulations of a clergyman (the lead actor) and his household when they arrive to begin a new ministry within Kengis, a remote settlement in northern Sweden, in 1852. Within a community lacking many joys, none of the locals particularly warm to his puritanical approach to alcohol and dancing, but it is his defense of the poor – especially the indigenous Sami, from which comes the preacher’s foster child the youth Jussi (the young actor) – and his belief in social justice and equality that places him on a collision course with the Kengis local authorities.

The Antagonists

Soon collaborating opposing him include the lawman the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the fearsome mill owner Madam Sjödahl (Pernilla August), observed initially firing a recently mangled laborer with minimal compensation while he is still babbling at the sight of his pulped hand, and all others who profit from a populace who can be bought with some containers of the whisky provided by the unsettling shopkeeper Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s eeriness pales once itinerant painter Beronius appears in the story (the performer, delivering an acting turn of rare unsettling intensity). While they remain – similar to the clergyman – only a little more than caricatures, they still serve as potent archetypes.

Plot Progression

With the seeds of tension planted, the moment arrives to get down with the storyline. The servant from the doctor’s house, the character Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), accordingly vanishes from the woods. Indications of her flight and bear markings upon a trunk are found but she is completely absent. Rumours and anxieties regarding a human-devouring beast prowling the woodland circulate, but the pastor holds a different view which he and his ward set out to verify.

An Odd Beast

To Cook a Bear is a somewhat peculiar show. It creates a fine sense of the desolation that lets distrust and bias and grim legends thrive based on local folklore that animals can be controlled or inhabited by the spirits of humans. And it doesn’t idealising the tough existence experienced by the residents, where brutality, be it from nature or people, lurks constantly at the periphery, poised to explode. But the characters seldom evolve beyond symbols – or perhaps, while the conflicts between justice and vengeance, rationality and faith, virtue and wickedness escalate, emblematic figures within a moral tale – which stops the whole thing truly coming to life.

Tonal Inconsistencies

And then, exist numerous stylistically clashing moments where the pastor’s ability to discover clues and discern the maid’s destiny turns nearly laughable. He positions himself observing shattered containers and clumps of hair within storage sheds as a fusion of the Belgian detective and Sherlock Holmes – with Jussi a rather hapless assistant figure (neither of whom had to taste a blend of blood spatter and the boss’s spit to agree that indeed, it was definitely coagulated blood at the crime scene), prior to declaring his newest conclusion and extracting a body out of a swamp.

Opposing Goals

The village elite are bent on proving that the maid met her end by a bear, maybe to preserve the peace, perhaps to shield one of their own. The clergyman is bent on establishing otherwise, and the proof so rapidly stacks up supporting his view that once more the show’s credibility and the viewer’s patience get strained. At its best, To Cook a Bear is reminiscent of the adaptation some years back of Sarah Perry’s the serpent tale, through its portrayal of the competing allures and fears presented by science and belief. At its worst, it resembles a bear-themed police procedural. Nevertheless, it appears to offer the answer to the earlier query: “Ladies, take the bear.”

• To Cook a Bear streams on Disney+ currently.