To Cook a Bear Review: This Daft Historical Crime Drama Is Like A Bear-Focused Detective Series
An heated discussion lately spread widely on social media, following a user posed the question to women: would you rather be lost in the woods with a man or a bear? Like all the best thought experiments, it revealed wildly different perspectives and experiences, illuminated chasms between the sexes, and was likely cause a deep personal dilemma for anyone pondering on it for too long. Additionally, there came the predictable coda in which men of a certain stripe came online to tell women how foolish they were to select the animal and proceeded to describe the punishments they deserved for it. This at minimum enabled those females who had been hesitating about their decision to decide with a new confidence.
Portraying the Scenario
The Bear-Cooking Tale skillfully brings to life this nifty little setup. This six-episode drama is adapted from Swedish author Mikael Niemi’s 2018 novel of the same name (rendered two years later for English readers). It traces the struggles of a pastor (the lead actor) and his family as they come to start a new ministry within Kengis, an isolated village in Sweden’s north, in 1852. Within a community lacking many joys, not one of the inhabitants especially warm to his puritanical approach to alcohol and dancing, but it is his protection of impoverished people – particularly the indigenous Sami, from among whom comes the preacher’s adopted son Jussi (the young actor) – and his conviction in societal fairness and equal rights that sets him on a collision course with the Kengis powers that be.
The Antagonists
Soon collaborating opposing him are the lawman Brahe (the performer), the fearsome mill owner Madam Sjödahl (Pernilla August), seen early on dismissing a recently mangled laborer with a month’s pay as he remains gibbering upon seeing of his pulped hand, and all others who benefit from a community who can be bought with some containers of the whisky sold by the creepy shopkeeper the merchant Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). However, in fairness, Lindmark’s eeriness pales once itinerant painter the artist Beronius arrives on the scene (Simon J Berger, delivering an acting turn of exceptional unsettling intensity). If they are – like the pastor himself – only a little more being stereotypes, they are at least effective ones.
Plot Progression
With the seeds of tension sown, the moment arrives to get down with the storyline. The servant employed by the doctor, the character Hilda (the actress), duly vanishes from the woods. Signs of her escape and animal scratches upon a trunk get discovered but she is completely absent. Rumours and fears regarding a human-devouring beast prowling the woods spread, but the pastor has another theory which he and his ward set out to prove.
An Odd Beast
This Bear Drama is a somewhat odd beast. It conjures a strong impression of the desolation that allows distrust and bias and dark myths flourish from the native legend that bears might be dominated or possessed by the souls of humans. And it doesn’t idealising the hardscrabble life experienced by the residents, where violence, whether that of the wild or mankind, lurks constantly on the edges, waiting to erupt. Yet the personas seldom evolve more than ciphers – or perhaps, as the struggles amid fairness and vengeance, logic and religion, virtue and wickedness escalate, representative characters within a moral tale – preventing the whole thing fully coming to life.
Stylistic Shifts
Additionally, exist the many stylistically clashing moments where the pastor’s ability in finding evidence and determine the maid’s destiny becomes almost risible. He stands observing broken milk pots and strands of fur within storage sheds as a fusion of the Belgian detective and Sherlock Holmes – alongside Jussi a rather hapless Hastings-cum-Watson (neither of whom were required to lick a blend of blood spatter and saliva from his superior to agree that, yes, it was definitely dried blood on the site), prior to declaring his latest deduction and extracting a body out of a swamp.
Opposing Goals
The local leaders are bent on demonstrating that Hilda was killed 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 rapidly accumulates supporting his view that again the show’s credibility and audience tolerance are tested. At its best, To Cook a Bear evokes memories of the TV version some years back of the author’s The Essex Serpent, through its portrayal of the opposing attractions and terrors offered by science and belief. At its worst, it’s more like Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Still, it does seem to provide the answer to the earlier query: “Females, choose the animal.”
The series is on Disney+ currently.
