The Bear Cooking Drama Review: This Daft Historical Crime Drama Resembles Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit

A intense debate recently spread widely on social media, following a user asked a query to women: which would you prefer find yourself stranded in the woods with a man or with a bear? Like all the best thought experiments, it revealed wildly different perspectives and life encounters, illuminated divides among genders, and was likely cause an existential crisis for anyone pondering about it for too long. There was also the predictable coda in which some males took to the internet to inform females how stupid they were for choosing the animal and proceeded to describe the consequences they deserved for that choice. This at least enabled the women who had been hesitating about their decision to make it with a new confidence.

Portraying the Scenario

The Bear-Cooking Tale skillfully brings to life this clever little setup. This six-episode series is adapted on Swedish author the novelist’s 2018 book of the same name (translated in 2020 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 within Kengis, a remote village in Sweden’s north, in 1852. In a place lacking many joys, none of the locals especially warm to his puritanical approach to drinking and dancing, yet it is his defense of the poor – especially the native Sami population, from among whom hails the pastor’s adopted son the youth Jussi (the young actor) – and his belief in societal fairness and equal rights that places him in direct opposition against the Kengis local authorities.

The Antagonists

Soon in cahoots against him include the lawman the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the fearsome mill owner Madam Sjödahl (Pernilla August), observed initially firing a recently mangled laborer with a month’s pay while he is still gibbering at the sight of his pulped hand, and all others who benefit from a populace easily swayed for a few bottles of the whisky provided by the unsettling shopkeeper Lindmark (the actor). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s eeriness pales once itinerant painter 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 than caricatures, they still serve as effective ones.

Plot Progression

With the seeds of tension sown, the moment arrives to get down with the storyline. The maid employed by the doctor, the character Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), duly vanishes in the forest. Signs of her flight and bear markings upon a trunk get discovered yet she remains completely absent. Rumours and anxieties regarding a human-devouring beast roaming the woodland spread, but the pastor has another theory which he and his ward set out to prove.

A Strange Creation

This Bear Drama is a somewhat odd beast. It conjures a fine sense of the desolation that lets distrust and prejudice and grim legends flourish based on local folklore that bears might be dominated or possessed by the spirits of humans. And it doesn’t romanticise the tough existence led by the villagers, where brutality, be it from nature or mankind, lurks constantly at the periphery, waiting to erupt. Yet the personas rarely become more than ciphers – or perhaps, as the struggles amid fairness and vengeance, logic and faith, good and wickedness intensify, representative characters within a moral tale – which stops the whole thing fully coming to life.

Stylistic Shifts

And then, exist the many stylistically clashing moments where the clergyman’s skill to discover clues and discern the maid’s destiny turns almost risible. He positions himself observing shattered containers and clumps of hair in hay barns as a fusion of Hercule Poirot the English sleuth – with Jussi a particularly unfortunate assistant figure (neither of whom were required to taste a mixture of blood droplets and the boss’s spit to confirm that, yes, it was definitely dried blood at the crime scene), before announcing his latest deduction and extracting a corpse from a bog.

Opposing Goals

The village elite are determined proving that the maid was killed by an animal, perhaps to preserve the calm, or possibly to protect one of their own. The clergyman is bent on proving the opposite, and the evidence so quickly accumulates supporting his view that once more the show’s credibility and the viewer’s patience are tested. In its finest moments, the series evokes memories of the TV version some years back of Sarah Perry’s the serpent tale, through its portrayal of the opposing allures and terrors offered by rational thought and belief. At its worst, it resembles a bear-themed police procedural. Nevertheless, it does seem to offer the response to that debated question: “Females, choose the animal.”

• The series is on Disney+ now.