To Cook a Bear Analysis: This Daft Period Mystery Resembles Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit

An heated discussion recently went viral across online platforms, after a user posed the question to women: which would you prefer be lost in the woods alongside a male or with a bear? Like all the best thought experiments, it revealed vastly opposing perspectives and life encounters, illuminated chasms among genders, and was likely cause an existential crisis if you thought about it extensively. There was also the almost inevitable coda where some males came online to tell women 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 had been hesitating over their choice to decide with a new confidence.

Portraying the Setup

To Cook a Bear skillfully brings to life this nifty little setup. The six-part drama is adapted from Swedish author Mikael Niemi’s 2018 book with the identical title (translated two years later for an English audience). It traces the struggles of a pastor (the lead actor) and his household when they arrive to begin a fresh religious post in Kengis, a remote settlement in Sweden’s north, in 1852. In a place lacking many joys, none of the locals especially warm to his puritanical stance on drinking and revelry, but it is his protection of impoverished people – particularly the native Sami population, from among whom hails the pastor’s foster child Jussi (the young actor) – and his belief in social justice and equal rights that sets him in direct opposition with the Kengis local authorities.

The Opposing Forces

Soon collaborating opposing him are the lawman the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the fearsome factory proprietor Madam Sjödahl (the actress), observed early on firing a newly injured laborer with minimal compensation as he remains gibbering upon seeing his crushed hand, and all others who profit from a community who can be bought for a few bottles of the whisky provided by the creepy shopkeeper Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). Although, to be fair, Lindmark’s eeriness diminishes when itinerant painter Beronius arrives on the scene (Simon J Berger, delivering a performance of exceptional 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 conflict planted, the moment arrives to get down with the storyline. The maid employed by the doctor, Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), accordingly vanishes from the woods. Signs of her flight and animal scratches upon a trunk get discovered yet she remains completely absent. Rumours and anxieties of a man/maid-eating bear roaming the woodland circulate, yet the clergyman has another theory that he and Jussi embark to prove.

An Odd Beast

This Bear Drama is a somewhat odd beast. It creates a fine sense of the bleakness that allows suspicion and prejudice and dark myths flourish based on local folklore that bears might be dominated or inhabited by the souls of men. And it doesn’t idealising the tough existence led by the residents, where brutality, be it from nature or people, always looms on the edges, poised to explode. Yet the personas rarely become beyond symbols – or perhaps, while the conflicts amid fairness and vengeance, rationality and faith, good and evil escalate, representative characters in a fable – preventing the entire production fully becoming immersive.

Stylistic Shifts

And then, exist the many tonally jarring moments in which the pastor’s ability to discover clues and determine the maid’s destiny turns nearly laughable. He stands observing broken milk pots and clumps of hair in hay barns like a combined the Belgian detective and Sherlock Holmes – with Jussi a rather hapless Hastings-cum-Watson (neither of whom had to taste a mixture of blood droplets and saliva from his superior to agree that indeed, it was clearly coagulated blood on the site), prior to declaring his newest conclusion and extracting a corpse out of a swamp.

Opposing Goals

The local leaders are determined demonstrating that the maid was killed by an animal, maybe to preserve the calm, perhaps to shield one of their own. The clergyman is bent on establishing otherwise, and the proof so quickly stacks up in his favour that again the show’s credibility and audience tolerance get strained. In its finest moments, the series evokes memories of the adaptation some years back of the author’s the serpent tale, through its portrayal of the opposing allures and terrors presented by rational thought and belief. At its worst, it’s more like a bear-themed police procedural. Still, it appears to offer the answer to that debated question: “Ladies, take the bear.”

• To Cook a Bear is on Disney+ now.