To Cook a Bear Review: A Daft Period Mystery Is Like Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit

A intense debate lately spread widely on social media, after a user asked the question to women: would you rather be lost in the woods alongside a male or a bear? Similar to the best thought experiments, it revealed wildly different worldviews and life encounters, highlighted chasms among genders, and was likely cause an existential crisis for anyone pondering about it for too long. Additionally, there came the almost inevitable follow-up in which some males took to the internet to tell women how foolish they were for choosing the bear and proceeded to limn the consequences they deserved for it. This at least allowed those females who had been hesitating over their choice to make it with renewed assurance.

Portraying the Scenario

To Cook a Bear effectively dramatises this nifty little setup. This six-episode series is adapted from Swedish author Mikael Niemi’s 2018 novel with the identical title (translated in 2020 for an English audience). It traces the struggles of a clergyman (the lead actor) and his family as they come to begin a fresh religious post within Kengis, an isolated village in Sweden’s north, during the mid-19th century. Within a community lacking many joys, not one of the inhabitants especially appreciate his puritanical approach to drinking and revelry, yet it is his protection of impoverished people – particularly the native Sami population, from which comes the preacher’s foster child the youth Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in social justice and equal rights that places him on a collision course against the Kengis local authorities.

The Opposing Forces

Soon in cahoots opposing him include the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the intimidating mill owner Madam Sjödahl (the actress), observed initially dismissing a recently mangled worker with a month’s pay as he remains babbling at the sight his crushed hand, and all others who profit from a populace easily swayed with some containers of the whisky sold by the creepy shopkeeper Lindmark (the actor). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s creepiness diminishes once itinerant painter Beronius appears in the story (the performer, providing an acting turn of exceptional unsettling intensity). While they remain – similar to the clergyman – only a little more than caricatures, they are at least potent archetypes.

Plot Progression

Once the foundations of tension planted, the moment arrives to proceed with the storyline. The servant from the doctor’s house, the character Hilda (the actress), accordingly vanishes from the woods. Signs of her flight and animal scratches upon a trunk are found but she is completely absent. Gossip and anxieties of a man/maid-eating beast roaming the woodland spread, but the pastor has another theory which he and his ward embark to prove.

An Odd Beast

To Cook a Bear is a slightly peculiar show. It creates a strong impression of the bleakness that allows suspicion and bias and grim legends thrive from the native legend that bears can be controlled or possessed by the spirits of men. And it doesn’t romanticise the hardscrabble life led by the villagers, where violence, be it from nature or people, lurks constantly on the edges, poised to explode. Yet the personas seldom evolve more than ciphers – or maybe, while the conflicts amid fairness and vengeance, rationality and religion, good and evil intensify, emblematic figures in a fable – which stops the entire production fully coming to life.

Stylistic Shifts

And then, there are numerous tonally jarring instances where the pastor’s ability to discover clues and discern the maid’s destiny becomes almost risible. He positions himself looking at shattered containers and strands of fur in hay barns as a fusion of Hercule Poirot and Sherlock Holmes – alongside Jussi a particularly unfortunate assistant figure (neither of whom had to taste a blend of blood droplets and the boss’s spit to agree that, yes, it was clearly coagulated blood on the site), prior to declaring his latest deduction and extracting a body out of a swamp.

Clashing Agendas

The village elite are determined proving that Hilda met her end by an animal, maybe to protect the peace, or possibly to shield a fellow elite. The clergyman is bent on establishing otherwise, and the evidence so rapidly accumulates supporting his view that once more the drama’s plausibility and the viewer’s patience are tested. At its best, To Cook a Bear is reminiscent of the adaptation some years back of the author’s the serpent tale, with its evocation of the competing allures and fears presented by science and belief. In its low points, it’s more like a bear-themed police procedural. Still, it appears to provide the response to the earlier query: “Females, choose the animal.”

• The series is on Disney+ now.