To Cook a Bear Analysis: This Daft Historical Crime Drama Resembles A Bear-Focused Detective Series

An heated discussion lately went viral on social media, following someone asked a query for females: would you rather be lost in a forest alongside a male or with a bear? Similar to the most engaging hypothetical scenarios, it revealed vastly opposing perspectives and life encounters, highlighted chasms between the sexes, and could easily to induce a deep personal dilemma for anyone pondering on it extensively. Additionally, there came the almost inevitable coda where men of a certain stripe came online to tell females how foolish they had been to select the bear and went on to describe the punishments they merited for it. This at minimum allowed those females who had been hesitating over their choice to decide with renewed assurance.

Dramatising the Scenario

The Bear-Cooking Tale effectively dramatises this clever small premise. The six-part drama is adapted from Swedish author the novelist’s 2018 novel with the identical title (translated two years later for an English audience). It traces the tribulations of a pastor (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his family when they arrive to begin a new ministry within Kengis, a remote village in northern Sweden, during the mid-19th century. In a place lacking many joys, not one of the locals especially warm to his puritanical stance on drinking and revelry, yet it is his defense of the poor – particularly the indigenous Sami, from which hails the preacher’s adopted son Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his conviction in social justice and equal rights that sets him on a collision course against the Kengis local authorities.

The Opposing Forces

Soon in cahoots opposing him are the lawman the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the intimidating factory proprietor the matron Sjödahl (Pernilla August), seen early on dismissing a recently mangled worker with minimal compensation as he remains gibbering at the sight of his pulped hand, and all others who benefit from a community who can be bought with some containers of liquor provided by the creepy shopkeeper Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s creepiness diminishes once travelling artist the artist Beronius appears on the scene (the performer, delivering an acting turn of rare unsettling intensity). While they remain – similar to the clergyman – just slightly beyond being stereotypes, they still serve as potent archetypes.

Narrative Development

With the seeds of tension sown, it is time to proceed with the storyline. The maid from the doctor’s house, the character Hilda (the actress), duly goes missing in the forest. Signs of her escape and animal scratches upon a trunk get discovered but she is nowhere to be seen. Gossip and anxieties regarding a human-devouring bear prowling the woods circulate, but the pastor has another theory which he and his ward set out to verify.

An Odd Beast

To Cook a Bear is a slightly odd beast. It creates a fine sense of the bleakness that lets distrust and bias and grim legends flourish from the native legend that animals can be controlled or possessed by the souls of men. It avoids romanticise the hardscrabble life led by the villagers, in which brutality, be it from nature or people, always looms at the periphery, poised to explode. But the characters rarely become more than ciphers – or maybe, while the conflicts between justice and revenge, logic and religion, virtue and evil escalate, emblematic figures within a moral tale – which stops the whole thing truly coming to life.

Tonal Inconsistencies

Additionally, there are the many stylistically clashing moments where the pastor’s ability in finding evidence and determine the maid’s destiny becomes nearly laughable. He positions himself looking at broken milk pots and strands of fur within storage sheds like a combined Hercule Poirot and Sherlock Holmes – alongside Jussi a particularly unfortunate Hastings-cum-Watson (none of whom were required to lick a mixture of blood spatter and saliva from his superior to agree that, yes, it was clearly coagulated blood on the site), before announcing his newest conclusion and pulling a body from a bog.

Clashing Agendas

The village elite are bent on proving that the maid was killed by a bear, perhaps to preserve the peace, perhaps to shield one of their own. The pastor is bent on establishing the opposite, and the proof so rapidly accumulates in his favour that again the drama’s plausibility and the viewer’s patience are tested. At its best, To Cook a Bear is reminiscent of the adaptation a few years ago of Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the opposing attractions and fears offered by rational thought and religion. At its worst, it resembles Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Nevertheless, it does seem to provide the response to that debated question: “Females, choose the animal.”

• To Cook a Bear streams on Disney+ now.