An intense debate recently went viral across online platforms, after someone posed the question for females: would you rather find yourself stranded in a forest alongside a male or a bear? Like all the most engaging thought experiments, it exposed wildly different worldviews and life encounters, highlighted chasms between the sexes, and was likely cause a deep personal dilemma for anyone pondering about it for too long. Additionally, there came the almost inevitable coda in which men of a certain stripe took to the internet to inform women how stupid they were for choosing the animal and went on to describe the punishments they deserved for it. This at minimum enabled the women who had been hesitating about their decision to decide with a new confidence.
Dramatising the Scenario
The Bear-Cooking Tale effectively dramatises this nifty little setup. The six-part series is adapted on Swedish author the novelist’s 2018 novel of the same name (translated two years later for English readers). It follows the struggles of a clergyman (the lead actor) and his family when they arrive to start a fresh religious post within Kengis, a remote village in northern Sweden, in 1852. In a place with few pleasures, none of the locals especially warm to his puritanical approach to drinking and dancing, yet it is his defense of the poor – particularly the native Sami population, from which hails the preacher’s adopted son Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in social justice and equal rights that sets him on a collision course with the Kengis local authorities.
The Opposing Forces
Quickly in cahoots against him include the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the fearsome factory proprietor the matron Sjödahl (Pernilla August), seen initially dismissing a recently mangled worker with minimal compensation while he is still gibbering upon seeing his crushed hand, and all others who profit from a community who can be bought for a few bottles of the whisky provided by the unsettling shopkeeper the merchant Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). However, in fairness, Lindmark’s eeriness diminishes when travelling artist the artist Beronius arrives on the scene (the performer, providing an acting turn of exceptional discomfiting power). While they remain – like the pastor himself – only a little more being stereotypes, they still serve as effective ones.
Plot Progression
With the seeds of tension sown, it is time to get down with the storyline. The maid from the doctor’s house, Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), accordingly goes missing from the woods. Indications of her escape and animal scratches on a tree get discovered but she is completely absent. Rumours and anxieties regarding a human-devouring bear prowling the woods spread, yet the clergyman holds a different view which he and his ward set out to prove.
An Odd Beast
This Bear Drama is a slightly odd beast. It conjures a strong impression of the bleakness that allows distrust and bias and dark myths thrive from the native legend that bears might be dominated or possessed by the souls of men. It avoids romanticise the tough existence experienced by the villagers, where brutality, whether that of nature or mankind, lurks constantly at the periphery, waiting to erupt. Yet the personas rarely become more than ciphers – or perhaps, as the struggles amid fairness and vengeance, logic and religion, good and wickedness escalate, emblematic figures in a fable – which stops the whole thing fully becoming immersive.
Stylistic Shifts
Additionally, there are the many tonally jarring moments in which the pastor’s ability to discover clues and determine Hilda’s fate turns almost risible. He stands observing broken milk pots and strands of fur within storage sheds like a combined Hercule Poirot the English sleuth – alongside Jussi a rather hapless assistant figure (none of whom had to taste a mixture of blood droplets and saliva from his superior to agree that, yes, it was clearly dried blood on the site), before announcing his newest conclusion and extracting a corpse from a bog.
Opposing Goals
The village elite are determined demonstrating that the maid was killed by an animal, perhaps to preserve the calm, or possibly to protect a fellow elite. The pastor is intent on establishing the opposite, and the proof so rapidly stacks up supporting his view that again the show’s credibility and the viewer’s patience are tested. In its finest moments, the series is reminiscent of the TV version a few years ago of the author’s the serpent tale, through its portrayal of the competing allures and terrors presented by rational thought and religion. At its worst, it’s more like a bear-themed police procedural. Still, it appears to offer the response to that debated question: “Ladies, take the bear.”
The series is on Disney+ now.
