The Bear Cooking Drama Review: This Silly Period Mystery Is Like Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit

An intense debate recently went viral across online platforms, following a user posed a query to women: 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 perspectives and life encounters, highlighted chasms between the sexes, and could easily cause an existential crisis if you thought on it extensively. Additionally, there came the predictable follow-up in which some males took to the internet to inform women how foolish they had been to select the animal and proceeded to limn the consequences they deserved for it. This at least allowed those females who had been hesitating over their choice to make it with renewed assurance.

Portraying the Setup

The Bear-Cooking Tale skillfully brings to life this clever little setup. This six-episode drama is based from Scandinavian writer Mikael Niemi’s 2018 novel of the same name (rendered two years later for English readers). It follows the struggles of a clergyman (the lead actor) and his household when they arrive to start a new ministry within Kengis, a remote settlement in northern Sweden, in 1852. Within a community with few pleasures, none of the locals particularly appreciate his strict approach to alcohol and revelry, yet it is his defense of the poor – particularly the native Sami population, from among whom hails the preacher’s adopted son the youth Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his conviction in social justice and equality that places him on a collision course against the Kengis local authorities.

The Opposing Forces

Soon in cahoots against him include the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the fearsome mill owner Madam Sjödahl (Pernilla August), seen early on dismissing a newly injured worker with minimal compensation while he is still gibbering upon seeing of his pulped hand, and anyone else who profit from a community easily swayed with some containers of the whisky sold by the unsettling store owner Lindmark (the actor). Although, to be fair, Lindmark’s creepiness diminishes once itinerant painter the artist Beronius appears in the story (Simon J Berger, providing an acting turn of exceptional unsettling intensity). While they remain – like the pastor himself – only a little more than caricatures, they still serve as potent archetypes.

Plot Progression

Once the foundations of tension planted, the moment arrives to proceed to narrative business. The maid employed by the doctor, Hilda (the actress), duly vanishes in the forest. Indications of her flight and bear markings on a tree get discovered yet she remains nowhere to be seen. Rumours and anxieties regarding a human-devouring bear prowling the woods circulate, yet the clergyman holds a different view that he and Jussi embark to prove.

An Odd Beast

To Cook a Bear is a somewhat peculiar show. It creates a strong impression of the desolation that allows distrust and bias and grim legends thrive based on local folklore that bears can be controlled or possessed by the spirits of men. And it doesn’t romanticise the hardscrabble life led by the residents, in which violence, whether that of the wild or people, lurks constantly on the edges, waiting to erupt. But the characters rarely become beyond symbols – or perhaps, while the conflicts between justice and revenge, rationality and faith, virtue and evil escalate, emblematic figures in a fable – preventing the whole thing truly coming to life.

Stylistic Shifts

And then, there are the many stylistically clashing moments in which the pastor’s ability in finding evidence and discern Hilda’s fate becomes almost risible. He positions himself looking at broken milk pots and strands of fur in hay barns as a fusion of Hercule Poirot the English sleuth – with Jussi a rather hapless Hastings-cum-Watson (neither of whom had to lick a blend of blood spatter and saliva from his superior to confirm that indeed, it was clearly dried blood on the site), before announcing his latest deduction and extracting a body from a bog.

Opposing Goals

The local leaders are bent on demonstrating that the maid was killed by a bear, maybe to protect the calm, or possibly to protect one of their own. The clergyman is intent on proving otherwise, and the evidence so quickly accumulates in his favour that once more the drama’s plausibility and audience tolerance are tested. At its best, To Cook a Bear 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 science and religion. In its low points, it resembles a bear-themed police procedural. Still, it does seem to offer the answer to that debated question: “Females, choose the animal.”

• The series is on Disney+ currently.