To Cook a Bear Review: This Silly Historical Crime Drama Is Like A Bear-Focused Detective Series

A heated debate lately went viral on social media, following a user posed a query to women: which would you prefer find yourself stranded in a forest alongside a male or a bear? Like all the best thought experiments, it revealed wildly different worldviews and experiences, highlighted divides among genders, and could easily cause an existential crisis if you thought about it for too long. There was also the almost inevitable follow-up where men of a certain stripe came online to tell females how stupid they had been to select the bear and went on to limn the punishments they deserved for that choice. This at minimum enabled the women who had been hesitating over their choice to decide with renewed assurance.

Dramatising the Setup

The Bear-Cooking Tale effectively dramatises this clever little setup. The six-part series is based from Swedish author the novelist’s 2018 novel with the identical title (translated in 2020 for English readers). It traces the struggles of a pastor (the lead actor) and his household as they come to begin a new ministry in Kengis, an isolated village in northern Sweden, during the mid-19th century. In a place with few pleasures, not one of the inhabitants particularly warm to his puritanical approach to alcohol and revelry, but it is his protection of impoverished people – particularly the indigenous Sami, from among whom hails the preacher’s adopted son the youth Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in societal fairness and equal rights that sets him in direct opposition with the Kengis local authorities.

The Antagonists

Soon collaborating against him are the lawman Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the fearsome mill owner Madam Sjödahl (Pernilla August), seen early on dismissing a newly injured worker with a month’s pay while he is still gibbering upon seeing his crushed hand, and all others who benefit from a populace easily swayed for a few bottles of liquor provided by the unsettling shopkeeper the merchant Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). Although, in fairness, Lindmark’s creepiness pales when itinerant painter Beronius arrives on the scene (Simon J Berger, providing an acting turn of rare unsettling intensity). While they remain – like the pastor himself – just slightly beyond being stereotypes, they still serve as potent archetypes.

Narrative Development

Once the foundations of tension sown, it is time to get down to narrative business. The maid employed by the doctor, Hilda (the actress), accordingly goes missing in the forest. Indications of her flight and bear markings upon a trunk get discovered yet she remains nowhere to be seen. Rumours and anxieties regarding a human-devouring bear roaming the woodland circulate, yet the clergyman holds a different view which he and his ward embark to verify.

A Strange Creation

This Bear Drama is a slightly odd beast. It conjures a fine sense of the desolation that lets distrust and bias and dark myths flourish based on local folklore that bears might be dominated or inhabited by the spirits of men. And it doesn’t romanticise the hardscrabble life experienced by the villagers, in which brutality, be it from nature or people, always looms on the edges, poised to explode. Yet the personas rarely become more than ciphers – or perhaps, while the conflicts amid fairness and revenge, logic and religion, good and wickedness escalate, emblematic figures within a moral tale – preventing the entire production truly coming to life.

Stylistic Shifts

Additionally, exist the many tonally jarring moments where the clergyman’s skill in finding evidence and determine the maid’s destiny turns nearly laughable. He stands observing shattered containers and clumps of hair in hay barns as a fusion of Hercule Poirot and Sherlock Holmes – alongside Jussi a rather hapless assistant figure (neither of whom were required to lick a mixture of blood droplets and the boss’s spit to confirm that, yes, it was clearly coagulated blood at the crime scene), prior to declaring his newest conclusion and pulling a body from a bog.

Clashing Agendas

The village elite are bent on demonstrating that Hilda was killed by a bear, maybe to protect the calm, or possibly to shield a fellow elite. The clergyman is intent on establishing otherwise, and the proof so quickly accumulates in his favour that once more the show’s credibility and audience tolerance are tested. At its best, the series is reminiscent of the TV version some years back of Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the competing attractions and fears offered by rational thought and religion. In its low points, it’s more like a bear-themed police procedural. Nevertheless, it appears to provide the answer to the earlier query: “Ladies, take the bear.”

• The series streams on Disney+ currently.