To Cook a Bear Analysis: A Daft Historical Crime Drama Is Like A Bear-Focused Detective Series

A heated discussion recently spread widely across online platforms, following a user posed the question to women: which would you prefer be lost in a forest with a man or with a bear? Similar to the best thought experiments, it exposed wildly different perspectives and experiences, highlighted chasms among genders, and was likely cause an existential crisis if you thought on it extensively. Additionally, there came the predictable follow-up where men of a certain stripe came online to tell females how foolish they were for choosing the bear and proceeded to describe the consequences they merited for that choice. This at least allowed the women who had been hesitating over their choice to decide with a new confidence.

Dramatising the Setup

To Cook a Bear skillfully brings to life this clever small premise. The six-part drama is adapted from Swedish author the novelist’s 2018 book of the same name (translated in 2020 for English readers). It follows the struggles of a clergyman (the lead actor) and his family when they arrive to begin a new ministry in Kengis, a remote village in Sweden’s north, in 1852. Within a community with few pleasures, none of the inhabitants especially appreciate his puritanical stance on alcohol and dancing, but it is his defense of impoverished people – particularly the native Sami population, from among whom hails the preacher’s foster child the youth Jussi (the young actor) – and his belief in societal fairness and equality that sets him on a collision course against the Kengis powers that be.

The Opposing Forces

Quickly in cahoots opposing him include the lawman the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the intimidating mill owner Madam Sjödahl (Pernilla August), seen initially firing a newly injured worker with a month’s pay as he remains gibbering upon seeing of his pulped hand, and all others who benefit from a community easily swayed for a few bottles of liquor sold by the creepy store owner Lindmark (the actor). Although, in fairness, Lindmark’s eeriness diminishes when travelling artist the artist Beronius arrives 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 being stereotypes, they still serve as potent archetypes.

Narrative Development

Once the foundations of conflict sown, the moment arrives to get down to narrative business. The maid from the doctor’s house, the character Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), duly vanishes from the woods. Signs of her escape and bear markings upon a trunk are found yet she remains completely absent. Gossip and fears regarding a human-devouring beast roaming the woodland circulate, but the pastor holds a different view that he and Jussi embark to prove.

A Strange Creation

To Cook a Bear is a somewhat odd beast. It creates a strong impression of the desolation that lets suspicion and bias and dark myths flourish based on local folklore that bears can be controlled or possessed by the souls of men. And it doesn’t romanticise the hardscrabble life led by the residents, in which violence, whether that of the wild or mankind, always looms at the periphery, poised to explode. But the characters rarely become beyond symbols – or perhaps, as the struggles amid fairness and vengeance, rationality and faith, good and evil escalate, representative characters within a moral tale – which stops the entire production fully coming to life.

Stylistic Shifts

Additionally, exist numerous stylistically clashing instances in which the clergyman’s skill in finding evidence and discern the maid’s destiny becomes nearly laughable. He stands observing shattered containers and strands of fur in hay barns like a combined the Belgian detective and Sherlock Holmes – alongside Jussi a rather hapless Hastings-cum-Watson (none of whom were required to lick a blend of blood spatter and the boss’s spit to agree that indeed, it was clearly dried blood at the crime scene), before announcing his newest conclusion and pulling a body from a bog.

Clashing Agendas

The local leaders are bent on proving that Hilda was killed by an animal, maybe to preserve the calm, perhaps to protect a fellow elite. The pastor is bent on establishing the opposite, and the evidence so quickly accumulates in his favour that again the show’s credibility and audience tolerance are tested. At its best, the series evokes memories of the adaptation a few years ago of Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, through its portrayal of the opposing allures and fears offered by rational thought and belief. In its low points, it’s more like Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Nevertheless, it appears to provide the response to that debated question: “Females, choose the animal.”

• The series is on Disney+ now.