A heated debate recently went viral across online platforms, following someone posed a query to women: would you rather be lost in the woods with a man or a bear? Similar to the most engaging hypothetical scenarios, it revealed vastly opposing perspectives and experiences, illuminated divides among genders, and was likely cause an existential crisis if you thought about it extensively. There was also the almost inevitable coda in which some males took to the internet to inform women how foolish they had been for choosing the bear and proceeded to limn the consequences they merited for that choice. This at least enabled those females who had been hesitating about their decision to decide with renewed assurance.
Portraying the Setup
The Bear-Cooking Tale effectively brings to life this clever small premise. This six-episode drama is adapted on Scandinavian writer Mikael Niemi’s 2018 novel of the same name (translated two years later for an English audience). It follows the tribulations of a pastor (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his household as they come to start a fresh religious post in Kengis, an isolated settlement in northern Sweden, during the mid-19th century. In a place with few pleasures, not one of the locals especially warm to his puritanical stance on alcohol and revelry, but it is his protection of the poor – especially the native Sami population, from among whom hails the pastor’s adopted son the youth Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in social justice and equality that places him on a collision course against the Kengis powers that be.
The Antagonists
Soon collaborating against him include the lawman the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the intimidating mill owner Madam Sjödahl (the actress), observed initially dismissing a newly injured worker with minimal compensation while he is still babbling upon seeing his crushed hand, and all others who profit from a populace easily swayed for a few bottles of the whisky sold by the unsettling shopkeeper the merchant Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s eeriness pales when travelling artist the artist Beronius appears on the scene (the performer, delivering an acting turn of rare unsettling intensity). While they remain – similar to the clergyman – only a little more being stereotypes, they are at least effective ones.
Plot Progression
Once the foundations of conflict sown, the moment arrives to get down to narrative business. The servant employed by the doctor, the character Hilda (the actress), accordingly goes missing in the forest. Signs of her flight and animal scratches upon a trunk are found yet she remains nowhere to be seen. Rumours and anxieties of a man/maid-eating beast roaming the woods circulate, but the pastor holds a different view which he and his ward embark to verify.
An Odd Beast
This Bear Drama is a slightly peculiar show. It conjures a strong impression of the bleakness that lets suspicion and prejudice and grim legends thrive based on local folklore that bears might be dominated or possessed by the souls of men. And it doesn’t romanticise the tough existence experienced by the villagers, in which brutality, whether that of the wild or people, always looms at the periphery, poised to explode. But the characters seldom evolve more than ciphers – or maybe, as the struggles between justice and vengeance, rationality and faith, good and evil intensify, emblematic figures within a moral tale – preventing the whole thing truly becoming immersive.
Stylistic Shifts
Additionally, exist numerous tonally jarring moments in which the pastor’s ability in finding evidence and determine the maid’s destiny turns almost risible. He stands looking at shattered containers and strands of fur in hay barns like a combined the Belgian detective and Sherlock Holmes – with Jussi a rather hapless Hastings-cum-Watson (neither of whom had to lick a mixture of blood spatter and saliva from his superior to agree that, yes, it was definitely dried blood at the crime scene), before announcing his latest deduction and pulling a body out of a swamp.
Clashing Agendas
The village elite are bent on demonstrating that Hilda was killed by a bear, perhaps to protect the calm, perhaps to shield one of their own. The clergyman is bent on establishing the opposite, and the evidence so rapidly stacks up supporting his view that once more the drama’s plausibility and audience tolerance get strained. In its finest moments, the series 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 presented by science and religion. At its worst, it’s more like Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Still, it appears to offer the response to the earlier query: “Females, choose the animal.”
The series streams on Disney+ now.
