The Bear Cooking Drama Review: This Daft Period Mystery Is Like A Bear-Focused Detective Series
A intense debate lately went viral across online platforms, after a user posed a query for females: would you rather be lost in a forest alongside a male or a bear? Like all the best thought experiments, it revealed vastly opposing perspectives and life encounters, highlighted divides among genders, and could easily cause a deep personal dilemma for anyone pondering on it for too long. There was also the almost inevitable follow-up in which men of a certain stripe came online to inform women how stupid they had been to select the bear and went on to describe the punishments they deserved 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 Scenario
The Bear-Cooking Tale effectively dramatises this clever little setup. The six-part series is adapted from Swedish author the novelist’s 2018 novel of the same name (rendered in 2020 for English readers). It traces the struggles of a clergyman (the lead actor) and his household when they arrive to begin a new ministry in Kengis, an isolated village in Sweden’s north, in 1852. In a place with few pleasures, not one of the locals especially appreciate his puritanical stance on alcohol and revelry, yet it is his protection of impoverished people – particularly the indigenous Sami, from among whom hails the preacher’s adopted son the youth Jussi (the young actor) – and his belief in social justice and equality that sets him in direct opposition with the Kengis powers that be.
The Antagonists
Soon in cahoots opposing him are the lawman the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the fearsome mill owner the matron Sjödahl (the actress), seen early on firing a recently mangled laborer with minimal compensation while he is still babbling at the sight his crushed hand, and all others who profit from a community easily swayed for a few bottles of liquor sold by the creepy shopkeeper the merchant Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). Although, in fairness, Lindmark’s creepiness pales when travelling artist Beronius appears on the scene (Simon J Berger, delivering a performance of rare unsettling intensity). While they remain – similar to the clergyman – just slightly beyond than caricatures, they still serve as effective ones.
Narrative Development
With the seeds of conflict sown, the moment arrives to get down to narrative business. The maid from the doctor’s house, the character Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), accordingly goes missing in the forest. Signs of her escape and animal scratches upon a trunk are found but she is 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 verify.
An Odd Beast
To Cook a Bear is a slightly peculiar show. It creates a strong impression of the bleakness that lets suspicion and prejudice and grim legends flourish from the native legend that animals might be dominated or inhabited by the spirits of men. It avoids romanticise the hardscrabble life led by the villagers, in which brutality, whether that of nature or mankind, always looms on the edges, waiting to erupt. Yet the personas rarely become beyond symbols – or maybe, as the struggles amid fairness and revenge, logic and faith, virtue and evil intensify, representative characters in a fable – preventing the whole thing truly coming to life.
Stylistic Shifts
And then, there are numerous tonally jarring moments where the clergyman’s skill to discover clues and determine Hilda’s fate turns nearly laughable. He positions himself looking at broken milk pots and clumps of hair in hay barns as a fusion of Hercule Poirot the English sleuth – with Jussi a rather hapless Hastings-cum-Watson (neither of whom were required to taste a blend of blood spatter and the boss’s spit to agree that, yes, it was clearly dried blood on the site), prior to declaring his newest conclusion and extracting a corpse out of a swamp.
Opposing Goals
The local leaders are bent on proving that Hilda met her end by a bear, maybe to protect the peace, or possibly to shield a fellow elite. The clergyman is bent on proving the opposite, and the proof so rapidly stacks up in his favour that again the show’s credibility and audience tolerance are tested. At its best, To Cook a Bear evokes memories of the adaptation some years back of the author’s the serpent tale, with its evocation of the competing allures and fears offered by rational thought and belief. In its low points, it’s more like a bear-themed police procedural. Nevertheless, it appears to offer the answer to the earlier query: “Ladies, take the bear.”
To Cook a Bear is on Disney+ currently.