The Bear Cooking Drama Analysis: This Silly Historical Crime Drama Is Like Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit

A heated discussion recently went viral on social media, following someone asked the question to women: would you rather find yourself stranded in the woods alongside a male or with a bear? Similar to the best hypothetical scenarios, it exposed vastly opposing worldviews and life encounters, highlighted chasms between the sexes, and could easily to induce an existential crisis if you thought about it for too long. There was also the almost inevitable follow-up in which men of a certain stripe took to the internet to inform women how stupid they were to select the bear and went on to describe the consequences they merited for that choice. This at least enabled the women who were uncertain about their decision to decide with a new confidence.

Dramatising the Scenario

The Bear-Cooking Tale skillfully dramatises this nifty small premise. The six-part drama is based from Scandinavian writer Mikael Niemi’s 2018 novel of the same name (translated two years later for an English audience). It traces the struggles of a pastor (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his family when they arrive to begin a new ministry within Kengis, an isolated village in northern Sweden, during the mid-19th century. In a place with few pleasures, not one of the locals particularly warm to his strict approach to alcohol and revelry, but it is his defense of the poor – especially the native Sami population, from among whom comes the preacher’s adopted son Jussi (the young actor) – and his belief in social justice and equality that sets him on a collision course with the Kengis local authorities.

The Opposing Forces

Soon in cahoots opposing him are the sheriff the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the fearsome factory proprietor Madam Sjödahl (Pernilla August), observed early on firing a recently mangled worker with minimal compensation as he remains gibbering at the sight of his pulped hand, and anyone else who benefit from a community who can be bought with some containers of liquor sold by the creepy shopkeeper Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s eeriness pales when travelling artist Beronius arrives in the story (Simon J Berger, providing a performance of rare discomfiting power). While they remain – similar to the clergyman – only a little more being stereotypes, they still serve as potent archetypes.

Narrative Development

With the seeds of tension planted, the moment arrives to get down with the storyline. The maid from the doctor’s house, Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), accordingly goes missing in the forest. Indications of her escape and animal scratches upon a trunk get discovered yet she remains nowhere to be seen. Gossip and fears regarding a human-devouring bear prowling the woodland circulate, yet the clergyman has another theory that he and Jussi embark to prove.

A Strange Creation

This Bear Drama is a slightly odd beast. It conjures a fine sense of the bleakness that lets distrust and bias and dark myths thrive from the native legend that animals can be controlled or inhabited by the spirits of men. It avoids romanticise the hardscrabble life led by the residents, in which violence, be it from the wild or people, always looms on the edges, waiting to erupt. But the characters seldom evolve more than ciphers – or maybe, while the conflicts amid fairness and revenge, logic and faith, virtue and evil intensify, emblematic figures in a fable – which stops the whole thing fully becoming immersive.

Stylistic Shifts

Additionally, exist numerous tonally jarring moments in which the pastor’s ability in finding evidence and discern Hilda’s fate turns nearly laughable. He positions himself looking at broken milk pots and clumps of hair in hay barns as a fusion of the Belgian detective the English sleuth – with Jussi a particularly unfortunate assistant figure (neither of whom were required to taste a blend of blood droplets and saliva from his superior to confirm that, yes, it was definitely dried blood at the crime scene), prior to declaring his newest conclusion and extracting a body from a bog.

Clashing Agendas

The village elite are bent on proving that Hilda was killed by a bear, perhaps to protect the calm, or possibly to protect a fellow elite. The clergyman is bent on establishing otherwise, and the evidence so quickly accumulates supporting his view that once more the show’s credibility and the viewer’s patience get strained. At its best, the series is reminiscent of the TV version some years back of Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the opposing allures and fears presented by science and religion. At its worst, it’s more like Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Still, it appears to offer the response to the earlier query: “Females, choose the animal.”

• The series is on Disney+ now.