A heated discussion recently went viral across online platforms, following someone asked a query to women: would you rather find yourself stranded in a forest alongside a male or with a bear? Like all the most engaging thought experiments, it exposed wildly different worldviews and experiences, highlighted divides between the sexes, and could easily cause a deep personal dilemma for anyone pondering on it for too long. There was also the almost inevitable follow-up in which some males came online to tell women how stupid they had been to select the animal and went on to limn the consequences they deserved for that choice. This at minimum enabled the women who were uncertain over their choice to make it with a new confidence.
Portraying the Scenario
The Bear-Cooking Tale skillfully brings to life this nifty little setup. The six-part series is based from Scandinavian writer Mikael Niemi’s 2018 novel with the identical title (translated two years later for English readers). It traces the struggles of a clergyman (the lead actor) and his household when they arrive to begin a new ministry within Kengis, a remote settlement in northern Sweden, during the mid-19th century. In a place lacking many joys, not one of the inhabitants particularly warm to his puritanical stance on drinking and revelry, yet it is his defense of the poor – particularly the indigenous Sami, from which comes the pastor’s foster child Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in social justice and equality that places him on a collision course against the Kengis local authorities.
The Opposing Forces
Soon in cahoots against him are the lawman the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the fearsome mill owner the matron Sjödahl (Pernilla August), observed initially dismissing a recently mangled laborer with a month’s pay while he is still gibbering upon seeing his crushed hand, and anyone else who profit from a community easily swayed for a few bottles of the whisky provided by the unsettling store owner Lindmark (the actor). Although, in fairness, Lindmark’s creepiness diminishes once itinerant painter the artist Beronius arrives in the story (Simon J Berger, delivering an acting turn of rare unsettling intensity). If they are – like the pastor himself – just slightly beyond than caricatures, they are at least effective ones.
Narrative Development
With the seeds of conflict planted, the moment arrives to proceed with the storyline. The maid employed by the doctor, Hilda (the actress), accordingly vanishes from the woods. Indications of her escape and bear markings on a tree get discovered yet she remains nowhere to be seen. Gossip and fears regarding a human-devouring bear prowling the woodland circulate, yet the clergyman has another theory that he and Jussi embark to prove.
A Strange Creation
This Bear Drama is a slightly peculiar show. It conjures a strong impression of the desolation that allows suspicion and bias and grim legends thrive from the native legend that animals can be controlled or inhabited by the souls of humans. And it doesn’t romanticise the hardscrabble life experienced by the villagers, in which brutality, be it from the wild or people, lurks constantly on the edges, poised to explode. But the characters seldom evolve beyond symbols – or maybe, as the struggles between justice and revenge, logic and religion, virtue and evil escalate, emblematic figures in a fable – which stops the whole thing fully becoming immersive.
Stylistic Shifts
And then, exist the many stylistically clashing moments in which the pastor’s ability in finding evidence and discern Hilda’s fate turns almost risible. He stands looking at shattered containers and clumps of hair in hay barns as a fusion of Hercule Poirot the English sleuth – alongside Jussi a rather hapless Hastings-cum-Watson (neither of whom were required to lick a blend of blood droplets and the boss’s spit to agree that indeed, it was clearly dried blood at the crime scene), before announcing his newest conclusion and pulling a corpse out of a swamp.
Opposing Goals
The village elite are bent on proving that the maid met her end by an animal, maybe to protect the peace, perhaps to protect a fellow elite. The pastor is bent on proving the opposite, and the proof so rapidly accumulates supporting his view that once more the show’s credibility and audience tolerance get strained. In its finest moments, the series evokes memories of the adaptation a few years ago of the author’s The Essex Serpent, through its portrayal of the opposing allures and terrors presented by science and religion. In its low points, it’s more like a bear-themed police procedural. Nevertheless, it does seem to offer the response to that debated question: “Ladies, take the bear.”
The series streams on Disney+ now.
