A heated discussion lately spread widely across online platforms, after someone posed a query for females: would you rather be lost in the woods alongside a male or a bear? Similar to the most engaging thought experiments, it exposed wildly different worldviews and life encounters, illuminated divides among genders, and could easily to induce a deep personal dilemma for anyone pondering about it for too long. Additionally, there came the almost inevitable follow-up in which men of a certain stripe took to the internet to inform females how foolish they were to select the bear and proceeded to limn the consequences they merited for it. This at least enabled the women who had been hesitating about their decision to make it with renewed assurance.
Dramatising the Scenario
The Bear-Cooking Tale effectively brings to life this clever little setup. This six-episode series is based on Swedish author Mikael Niemi’s 2018 novel with the identical title (rendered two years later for an English audience). It traces the tribulations of a clergyman (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his household when they arrive to start a new ministry within Kengis, a remote village in northern Sweden, during the mid-19th century. Within a community with few pleasures, not one of the locals particularly appreciate his puritanical stance on alcohol and revelry, yet it is his defense of impoverished people – especially the indigenous Sami, from among whom hails the pastor’s adopted son the youth Jussi (the young actor) – and his belief in societal fairness and equal rights that sets him in direct opposition against the Kengis local authorities.
The Antagonists
Soon collaborating against him are the sheriff the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the fearsome factory proprietor the matron Sjödahl (the actress), seen 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 with some containers of liquor sold by the unsettling shopkeeper Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). Although, in fairness, Lindmark’s creepiness pales when itinerant painter Beronius arrives on the scene (the performer, delivering an acting turn of rare discomfiting power). While they remain – similar to the clergyman – only a little more than caricatures, they are at least effective ones.
Plot Progression
With the seeds of conflict planted, it is time to proceed with the storyline. The maid from the doctor’s house, Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), duly goes missing from the woods. Indications of her escape and bear markings upon a trunk are found but she is completely absent. Rumours and fears of a man/maid-eating beast roaming the woodland circulate, but the pastor holds a different view that he and Jussi embark to verify.
A Strange Creation
This Bear Drama is a slightly peculiar show. It creates a fine sense of the desolation that allows suspicion and prejudice and dark myths thrive based on local folklore that bears might be dominated or possessed by the spirits of humans. And it doesn’t idealising the hardscrabble life experienced by the residents, where violence, whether that of nature or people, always looms on the edges, waiting to erupt. Yet the personas rarely become more than ciphers – or maybe, while the conflicts amid fairness and revenge, rationality and faith, virtue and wickedness intensify, emblematic figures in a fable – which stops the entire production fully coming to life.
Tonal Inconsistencies
And then, there are the many stylistically clashing instances where the pastor’s ability to discover clues and determine Hilda’s fate becomes almost risible. He positions himself observing broken milk pots and strands of fur in hay barns like a combined the Belgian detective the English sleuth – with Jussi a particularly unfortunate Hastings-cum-Watson (none of whom had to lick a blend of blood droplets and the boss’s spit to confirm that, yes, it was definitely dried blood on the site), prior to declaring his newest conclusion and pulling a corpse out of a swamp.
Opposing Goals
The local leaders are determined proving that Hilda was killed by a bear, maybe to preserve the calm, perhaps to protect one of their own. The clergyman is intent on establishing otherwise, and the evidence so quickly accumulates in his favour that again the show’s credibility and the viewer’s patience get strained. At its best, the series evokes memories of the TV version some years back of Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, through its portrayal of the opposing allures and terrors offered by science and belief. In its low points, it resembles Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Still, it does seem to offer the response to that debated question: “Females, choose the animal.”
The series streams on Disney+ currently.
