To Cook a Bear Analysis: A Silly Period Mystery Resembles Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit

A intense discussion recently went viral across online platforms, following someone asked a query to women: which would you prefer find yourself stranded in the woods with a man or with a bear? Similar to the best thought experiments, it exposed vastly opposing worldviews and experiences, illuminated divides between the sexes, and was likely to induce an existential crisis if you thought about it for too long. Additionally, there came the predictable coda in which men of a certain stripe took to the internet to inform females how stupid they were to select the animal and proceeded to describe the consequences they merited for that choice. This at least enabled those females who had been hesitating over their choice to make it with a new confidence.

Portraying the Setup

The Bear-Cooking Tale effectively brings to life this nifty small premise. The six-part series is based on Scandinavian writer Mikael Niemi’s 2018 book of the same name (translated in 2020 for an English audience). It follows the tribulations of a clergyman (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his family when they arrive to begin a fresh religious post in Kengis, a remote village in Sweden’s north, in 1852. In a place with few pleasures, none of the inhabitants especially warm to his strict approach to drinking and dancing, yet it is his defense of the poor – especially the indigenous Sami, from which comes the pastor’s adopted son the youth Jussi (the young actor) – and his belief in societal fairness and equality that sets him in direct opposition with the Kengis powers that be.

The Opposing Forces

Soon in cahoots against him include the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the fearsome mill owner Madam Sjödahl (the actress), observed initially firing a newly injured laborer with minimal compensation as he remains babbling at the sight of his pulped hand, and all others who benefit from a community who can be bought for a few bottles of the whisky sold by the unsettling shopkeeper the merchant Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s eeriness pales once itinerant painter the artist Beronius arrives in the story (the performer, providing a performance of rare discomfiting power). If they are – similar to the clergyman – just slightly beyond than caricatures, they are at least effective ones.

Narrative Development

Once the foundations of conflict planted, the moment arrives to get down to narrative business. The maid employed by the doctor, Hilda (the actress), duly goes missing from the woods. Indications of her flight and bear markings on a tree are found but she is nowhere to be seen. Rumours and fears of a man/maid-eating bear roaming the woodland spread, yet the clergyman has another theory which he and his ward set out to verify.

A Strange Creation

This Bear Drama is a somewhat odd beast. It creates a fine sense of the desolation that lets suspicion and bias and grim legends thrive based on local folklore that animals can be controlled or inhabited by the spirits of men. And it doesn’t romanticise the tough existence led by the residents, in which violence, be it from the wild or mankind, lurks constantly on the edges, poised to explode. Yet the personas rarely become more than ciphers – or perhaps, as the struggles amid fairness and vengeance, logic and faith, virtue and evil escalate, representative characters in a fable – preventing the entire production fully becoming immersive.

Tonal Inconsistencies

Additionally, there are the many tonally jarring instances in which the clergyman’s skill in finding evidence and determine Hilda’s fate turns nearly laughable. He stands observing shattered containers and clumps of hair in hay barns like a combined Hercule Poirot the English sleuth – with Jussi a particularly unfortunate Hastings-cum-Watson (neither of whom were required to lick a blend of blood spatter and the boss’s spit to agree that indeed, it was clearly coagulated blood on the site), prior to declaring his latest deduction and extracting a body out of a swamp.

Opposing Goals

The village elite are determined proving that Hilda was killed by a bear, perhaps to protect the calm, perhaps to protect one of their own. The pastor is intent on establishing the opposite, and the evidence so quickly accumulates supporting his view that again the show’s credibility and audience tolerance are tested. In its finest moments, the series is reminiscent of the TV version some years back of the author’s the serpent tale, with its evocation 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 response to that debated question: “Ladies, take the bear.”

• To Cook a Bear streams on Disney+ currently.