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, following someone asked the question for females: would you rather be lost in a forest alongside a male or with a bear? Like all the best thought experiments, it revealed wildly different worldviews and life encounters, illuminated divides among genders, and was likely to induce an existential crisis for anyone pondering about it for too long. Additionally, there came the predictable follow-up in which men of a certain stripe came online to inform females how stupid they were to select the animal and went on to describe the consequences they merited for it. This at minimum allowed those females who were uncertain over their choice to decide with renewed assurance.

Portraying the Setup

The Bear-Cooking Tale effectively dramatises this clever little setup. The six-part series is adapted on Scandinavian writer Mikael Niemi’s 2018 book with the identical title (translated two years later for English readers). It follows the tribulations of a clergyman (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his family as they come to begin a fresh religious post in Kengis, an isolated settlement in northern Sweden, during the mid-19th century. Within a community with few pleasures, none of the locals particularly warm to his puritanical stance on drinking and revelry, but it is his protection of impoverished people – particularly the indigenous Sami, from among whom hails the pastor’s foster child the youth Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his conviction in societal fairness and equal rights that sets him on a collision course with the Kengis powers that be.

The Opposing Forces

Quickly collaborating opposing him are the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the intimidating factory proprietor Madam Sjödahl (the actress), observed initially dismissing a newly injured laborer with a month’s pay as he remains babbling at the sight of his pulped hand, and all others who profit from a community easily swayed for a few bottles of the whisky provided by the creepy store owner the merchant Lindmark (the actor). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s eeriness diminishes once itinerant painter the artist Beronius arrives on the scene (the performer, delivering a performance of exceptional unsettling intensity). While they remain – like the pastor himself – only a little more being stereotypes, they are at least potent archetypes.

Plot Progression

With the seeds of tension sown, the moment arrives to proceed to narrative business. The maid from the doctor’s house, the character Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), duly goes missing from the woods. Indications of her escape and animal scratches on a tree get discovered yet she remains completely absent. Gossip and anxieties regarding a human-devouring bear prowling the woodland spread, but the pastor holds a different view which he and his ward set out to prove.

An Odd Beast

This Bear Drama is a slightly odd beast. It conjures a fine sense of the bleakness that lets distrust and prejudice and dark myths thrive from the native legend that animals can be controlled or inhabited by the spirits of humans. And it doesn’t idealising the hardscrabble life led by the villagers, where brutality, whether that of the wild or mankind, always looms at the periphery, waiting to erupt. But the characters rarely become more than ciphers – or perhaps, while the conflicts between justice and revenge, logic and religion, virtue and evil intensify, emblematic figures within a moral tale – preventing the whole thing fully coming to life.

Stylistic Shifts

Additionally, exist numerous stylistically clashing instances where the clergyman’s skill in finding evidence and determine Hilda’s fate turns nearly laughable. He stands observing shattered containers and clumps of hair within storage sheds like a combined Hercule Poirot the English sleuth – alongside Jussi a particularly unfortunate assistant figure (neither of whom had to lick a blend of blood droplets and the boss’s spit to confirm that, yes, it was definitely coagulated blood at the crime scene), prior to declaring his latest deduction and pulling a body from a bog.

Clashing Agendas

The village elite are bent on proving that Hilda met her end by an animal, maybe to preserve the calm, or possibly to protect one of their own. The pastor is bent on proving otherwise, and the proof so quickly accumulates in his favour that once more the show’s credibility and audience tolerance get strained. At its best, the series evokes memories of the TV version a few years ago of Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, through its portrayal of the opposing attractions and terrors presented by rational thought and belief. In its low points, it’s more like a bear-themed police procedural. Still, it does seem to offer the response to the earlier query: “Females, choose the animal.”

• The series is on Disney+ currently.