To Cook a Bear Review: A Daft Historical Crime Drama Resembles Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit

An intense discussion recently went viral on social media, following a user asked a query to women: would you rather find yourself stranded in a forest alongside a male or a bear? Similar to the most engaging thought experiments, it revealed wildly different perspectives and life encounters, highlighted chasms among genders, and could easily to induce an existential crisis if you thought about it extensively. Additionally, there came the predictable follow-up in which men of a certain stripe came online to tell females how foolish they were for choosing the bear and proceeded to describe the punishments they merited for it. This at minimum allowed those females who were uncertain about their decision to decide with renewed assurance.

Dramatising the Scenario

To Cook a Bear skillfully dramatises this nifty little setup. This six-episode series is adapted on Swedish author the novelist’s 2018 novel with the identical title (rendered two years later for English readers). It traces the struggles of a clergyman (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his family when they arrive to begin a fresh religious post within Kengis, a remote village in Sweden’s north, in 1852. In a place lacking many joys, not one of the inhabitants particularly appreciate his puritanical stance on drinking and dancing, yet it is his defense of impoverished people – especially the indigenous Sami, from which comes the preacher’s foster child Jussi (the young actor) – and his conviction in social justice and equality that places him on a collision course against the Kengis local authorities.

The Opposing Forces

Quickly collaborating against him include the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the intimidating factory proprietor the matron Sjödahl (the actress), seen initially dismissing a recently mangled laborer with a month’s pay while he is still gibbering upon seeing of his pulped hand, and anyone else who profit from a community who can be bought for a few bottles of liquor sold by the unsettling store owner Lindmark (the actor). Although, in fairness, Lindmark’s eeriness diminishes once travelling artist the artist Beronius appears in the story (the performer, providing an acting turn of rare unsettling intensity). While they remain – like the pastor himself – just slightly beyond than caricatures, they still serve as potent archetypes.

Plot Progression

With the seeds of tension 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. Indications of her escape and bear markings upon a trunk are found yet she remains completely absent. Rumours and fears regarding a human-devouring bear roaming the woods circulate, yet the clergyman holds a different view that he and Jussi embark to verify.

An Odd Beast

This Bear Drama is a somewhat peculiar show. It conjures a fine sense of the desolation that allows distrust and prejudice and grim legends flourish based on local folklore that animals might be dominated or possessed by the spirits of men. And it doesn’t idealising the hardscrabble life led by the villagers, where violence, whether that of nature or mankind, always looms at the periphery, waiting to erupt. Yet the personas rarely become beyond symbols – or maybe, as the struggles between justice and revenge, rationality and faith, good and wickedness intensify, emblematic figures in a fable – which stops the whole thing truly becoming immersive.

Stylistic Shifts

And then, exist the many tonally jarring moments where the clergyman’s skill in finding evidence and discern Hilda’s fate becomes nearly laughable. He positions himself observing shattered containers and clumps of hair within storage sheds as a fusion of the Belgian detective and Sherlock Holmes – with Jussi a rather hapless assistant figure (neither of whom had to taste a blend of blood spatter and the boss’s spit to confirm that indeed, it was clearly coagulated blood at the crime scene), before announcing his newest conclusion and pulling a corpse out of a swamp.

Opposing Goals

The local leaders are bent on demonstrating that Hilda was killed by an animal, maybe to protect the calm, or possibly to shield one of their own. The clergyman is intent on establishing the opposite, and the proof so quickly accumulates in his favour that again the show’s credibility and audience tolerance are tested. In its finest moments, the series evokes memories of the TV version a few years ago of Sarah Perry’s the serpent tale, with its evocation of the competing attractions and fears presented by science and belief. In its low points, it resembles Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Still, it appears to offer the answer to that debated question: “Females, choose the animal.”

• To Cook a Bear streams on Disney+ currently.