The Bear Cooking Drama Review: A Silly Period Mystery Resembles Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit

A heated discussion lately went viral across online platforms, following a user asked the question to women: would you rather be lost in a forest alongside a male or with a bear? Like all the best hypothetical scenarios, it exposed vastly opposing worldviews and life encounters, illuminated chasms among genders, and was likely to induce a deep personal dilemma if you thought about it extensively. Additionally, there came the predictable follow-up in which some males took to the internet to tell females how stupid they had been for choosing the bear and proceeded to describe the consequences they merited for that choice. This at minimum enabled those females who were uncertain about their decision to make it with a new confidence.

Portraying the Setup

The Bear-Cooking Tale effectively brings to life this nifty small premise. This six-episode drama is adapted from Scandinavian writer the novelist’s 2018 book of the same name (translated in 2020 for English readers). It traces the tribulations of a pastor (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his family as they come to start a new ministry in Kengis, an isolated village in Sweden’s north, during the mid-19th century. In a place with few pleasures, none of the inhabitants especially appreciate his puritanical stance on drinking and dancing, but it is his defense of impoverished people – especially the native Sami population, from which comes the preacher’s foster child the youth Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his conviction in social justice and equal rights that sets him on a collision course against the Kengis powers that be.

The Opposing Forces

Quickly collaborating opposing him are the sheriff the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the intimidating mill owner Madam Sjödahl (the actress), seen early on firing a newly injured worker with a month’s pay while he is still babbling upon seeing his crushed hand, and anyone else who profit from a community who can be bought with some containers of the whisky sold by the unsettling store owner the merchant Lindmark (the actor). However, in fairness, Lindmark’s eeriness pales when travelling artist Beronius arrives on the scene (Simon J Berger, delivering an acting turn of exceptional discomfiting power). If they are – similar to the clergyman – just slightly beyond than caricatures, they still serve as potent archetypes.

Plot Progression

Once the foundations of conflict sown, it is time to get down to narrative business. The maid employed by the doctor, Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), duly goes missing from the woods. Indications of her flight and animal scratches on a tree are found yet she remains completely absent. Gossip and anxieties regarding a human-devouring beast prowling the woodland spread, but the pastor has another theory that he and Jussi embark to prove.

An Odd Beast

This Bear Drama is a slightly peculiar show. It creates a fine sense of the desolation that lets suspicion and prejudice and dark myths thrive from the native legend that bears might be dominated or inhabited by the souls of humans. It avoids romanticise the tough existence led by the residents, in which violence, whether that of nature or mankind, lurks constantly at the periphery, waiting to erupt. Yet the personas seldom evolve more than ciphers – or maybe, as the struggles between justice and revenge, logic and religion, virtue and evil intensify, emblematic figures within a moral tale – which stops the entire production truly becoming immersive.

Stylistic Shifts

And then, exist the many stylistically clashing moments in which the clergyman’s skill to discover clues and discern Hilda’s fate becomes nearly laughable. He positions himself looking at broken milk pots and clumps of hair within storage sheds as a fusion of Hercule Poirot the English sleuth – alongside Jussi a particularly unfortunate Hastings-cum-Watson (neither of whom were required to taste a mixture of blood droplets and saliva from his superior to agree that indeed, it was definitely coagulated blood on the site), before announcing his latest deduction and extracting a body out of a swamp.

Clashing Agendas

The village elite are determined proving that the maid was killed by a bear, perhaps to protect the calm, perhaps to shield one of their own. The pastor is bent on proving otherwise, and the evidence so quickly stacks up in his favour that again the drama’s plausibility and the viewer’s patience get strained. In its finest moments, the series evokes memories of the TV version some years back of the author’s the serpent tale, through its portrayal of the competing allures and terrors offered by rational thought and religion. In its low points, it’s more like a bear-themed police procedural. Still, it does seem to provide the response to the earlier query: “Ladies, take the bear.”

• The series is on Disney+ now.