A heated discussion recently went viral across online platforms, after a user asked a query to women: which would you prefer find yourself stranded in the woods with a man or a bear? Like all the best thought experiments, it exposed vastly opposing perspectives and experiences, illuminated divides between the sexes, and was likely cause a deep personal dilemma for anyone pondering about it extensively. Additionally, there came the predictable coda where some males took to the internet to inform females how foolish they had been for choosing the bear and went on to describe the punishments they merited for it. This at least allowed the women who were uncertain over their choice to make it with renewed assurance.
Dramatising the Scenario
The Bear-Cooking Tale skillfully brings to life this clever small premise. This six-episode drama is adapted from Swedish author Mikael Niemi’s 2018 novel of the same name (translated two years later for an English audience). It follows the struggles of a pastor (the lead actor) and his household as they come to start a fresh religious post within Kengis, an isolated village in Sweden’s north, in 1852. In a place lacking many joys, none of the locals particularly appreciate his puritanical stance on alcohol and revelry, but it is his protection of impoverished people – particularly the indigenous Sami, from which comes the pastor’s foster child Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his conviction in social justice and equal rights that sets him on a collision course against the Kengis powers that be.
The Antagonists
Soon collaborating opposing him are the sheriff the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the intimidating mill owner the matron Sjödahl (Pernilla August), observed initially firing a newly injured worker with minimal compensation as he remains gibbering upon seeing of his pulped hand, and anyone else who benefit from a populace easily swayed with some containers of liquor provided by the creepy store owner the merchant Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). However, in fairness, Lindmark’s eeriness diminishes when travelling artist the artist Beronius appears in the story (Simon J Berger, delivering a performance of exceptional unsettling intensity). While they remain – similar to the clergyman – just slightly beyond being stereotypes, they are at least potent archetypes.
Narrative Development
With the seeds of conflict sown, the moment arrives to get down to narrative business. The servant employed by the doctor, the character Hilda (the actress), accordingly vanishes in the forest. Signs of her flight and bear markings upon a trunk get discovered but she is nowhere to be seen. Rumours and fears of a man/maid-eating beast prowling the woodland circulate, but the pastor has another theory which he and his ward set out to verify.
An Odd Beast
This Bear Drama is a somewhat peculiar show. It creates a fine sense of the bleakness that lets distrust and prejudice and dark myths flourish based on local folklore that bears can be controlled or inhabited by the souls of men. And it doesn’t idealising the tough existence led by the residents, where violence, whether that of the wild or people, always looms at the periphery, poised to explode. But the characters rarely become beyond symbols – or perhaps, while the conflicts between justice and revenge, logic and religion, good and evil intensify, emblematic figures within a moral tale – preventing the whole thing fully becoming immersive.
Tonal Inconsistencies
Additionally, there are numerous stylistically clashing instances in which the clergyman’s skill to discover clues and discern Hilda’s fate turns almost risible. He stands observing shattered containers and clumps of hair within storage sheds like a combined Hercule Poirot the English sleuth – alongside Jussi a rather hapless Hastings-cum-Watson (none of whom were required to taste a mixture of blood droplets and the boss’s spit to agree that, yes, it was clearly dried blood at the crime scene), prior to declaring his latest deduction and pulling a corpse from a bog.
Opposing Goals
The village elite are determined proving that the maid was killed by a bear, perhaps to protect the calm, or possibly to shield one of their own. The clergyman is bent on establishing otherwise, and the evidence so quickly accumulates in his favour that again the drama’s plausibility and the viewer’s patience are tested. In its finest moments, the series evokes memories of the TV version some years back of the author’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the opposing allures and fears presented by science and belief. At its worst, it resembles a bear-themed police procedural. Nevertheless, it does seem to provide the response to the earlier query: “Ladies, take the bear.”
The series streams on Disney+ currently.
