To Cook a Bear Review: This Daft Period Mystery Is Like A Bear-Focused Detective Series
A intense debate lately spread widely on social media, following a user posed the question for females: would you rather 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 experiences, illuminated divides among genders, and could easily to induce an existential crisis if you thought about it extensively. Additionally, there came the almost inevitable follow-up where men of a certain stripe took to the internet to tell women how stupid they were to select the bear and proceeded to limn the consequences they deserved for it. This at least enabled those females who had been hesitating over their choice to decide with renewed assurance.
Portraying the Setup
The Bear-Cooking Tale effectively dramatises this clever small premise. This six-episode drama is based from Swedish author Mikael Niemi’s 2018 novel of the same name (translated two years later for English readers). It follows the tribulations of a pastor (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his household as they come to start a new ministry in Kengis, an isolated settlement in northern Sweden, in 1852. In a place lacking many joys, none of the locals particularly appreciate his strict approach to drinking and dancing, yet it is his defense of impoverished people – particularly the indigenous Sami, from which hails the pastor’s foster child Jussi (the young actor) – and his conviction in societal fairness and equality that sets him in direct opposition against the Kengis local authorities.
The Antagonists
Soon collaborating against him are the lawman Brahe (the performer), the intimidating mill owner the matron Sjödahl (the actress), seen initially dismissing a newly injured laborer with a month’s pay as he remains gibbering at the sight of his pulped hand, and anyone else who profit from a populace easily swayed with some containers of the whisky provided by the creepy store owner Lindmark (the actor). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s creepiness diminishes when itinerant painter Beronius appears in the story (the performer, delivering a performance of exceptional discomfiting power). If they are – similar to the clergyman – only a little more being stereotypes, they are at least effective ones.
Plot Progression
Once the foundations of tension sown, it is time to proceed to narrative business. The servant employed by the doctor, Hilda (the actress), duly vanishes in the forest. Signs of her escape and bear markings on a tree get discovered but she is nowhere to be seen. Rumours and fears regarding a human-devouring bear roaming the woods spread, yet the clergyman holds a different view that he and Jussi set out to prove.
A Strange Creation
This Bear Drama is a slightly odd beast. It conjures a strong impression of the bleakness that allows suspicion and prejudice and grim legends flourish based on local folklore that animals might be dominated or possessed by the spirits of humans. It avoids romanticise the hardscrabble life led by the residents, where violence, whether that of nature or mankind, lurks constantly on the edges, waiting to erupt. But the characters rarely become beyond symbols – or maybe, as the struggles between justice and revenge, rationality and faith, virtue and wickedness intensify, emblematic figures in a fable – which stops the entire production truly becoming immersive.
Stylistic Shifts
And then, exist numerous stylistically clashing instances in which the clergyman’s skill to discover clues and determine the maid’s destiny becomes almost risible. He stands observing shattered containers and strands of fur in hay barns like a combined the Belgian detective the English sleuth – with Jussi a particularly unfortunate Hastings-cum-Watson (neither of whom were required to taste a blend of blood droplets and saliva from his superior to agree that indeed, it was clearly coagulated blood at the crime scene), before announcing his latest deduction and pulling a corpse out of a swamp.
Clashing Agendas
The local leaders are bent on demonstrating that the maid was killed by an animal, maybe to protect the calm, or possibly to protect a fellow elite. The clergyman is bent on establishing the opposite, and the proof so rapidly accumulates supporting his view that again the drama’s plausibility and audience tolerance get strained. In its finest moments, the series is reminiscent of the adaptation a few years ago of Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the opposing allures and fears offered by rational thought and religion. In its low points, it resembles a bear-themed police procedural. Nevertheless, it appears to offer the answer to that debated question: “Females, choose the animal.”
To Cook a Bear is on Disney+ now.
