A intense debate lately went viral across online platforms, after a user asked the question for females: which would you prefer be lost in a forest with a man or with a bear? Similar to the most engaging hypothetical scenarios, it revealed vastly opposing perspectives and experiences, illuminated divides among genders, and was likely to induce a deep personal dilemma for anyone pondering on it for too long. Additionally, there came the almost inevitable coda where men of a certain stripe came online to inform women how foolish they were to select the bear and proceeded to limn the punishments they merited for that choice. This at minimum enabled the women who had been hesitating over their choice to decide with renewed assurance.
Dramatising the Setup
The Bear-Cooking Tale skillfully brings to life this nifty little setup. This six-episode drama is adapted on Swedish author Mikael Niemi’s 2018 novel of the same name (rendered two years later for an English audience). It follows the struggles of a pastor (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his household as they come to start a fresh religious post in Kengis, an isolated village in Sweden’s north, during the mid-19th century. Within a community lacking many joys, none of the locals especially warm to his strict approach to drinking and revelry, but it is his defense of the poor – particularly the indigenous Sami, from which hails the preacher’s foster child Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his conviction in societal fairness and equality that sets him on a collision course against the Kengis powers that be.
The Antagonists
Quickly in cahoots opposing him are the sheriff the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the intimidating factory proprietor the matron Sjödahl (the actress), observed early on dismissing a newly injured worker with minimal compensation as he remains gibbering upon seeing his crushed hand, and anyone else who benefit from a populace who can be bought with some containers of the whisky sold by the unsettling shopkeeper the merchant Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). Although, to be fair, Lindmark’s eeriness pales once travelling artist the artist Beronius appears on the scene (Simon J Berger, providing an acting turn of rare unsettling intensity). While they remain – like the pastor himself – only a little more than caricatures, they still serve as potent archetypes.
Plot Progression
Once the foundations of tension planted, it is time to proceed to narrative business. The maid from the doctor’s house, the character Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), duly vanishes from the woods. Indications of her escape and bear markings upon a trunk are found but she is nowhere to be seen. Gossip and anxieties of a man/maid-eating beast roaming the woodland spread, yet the clergyman holds a different view that he and Jussi set out to verify.
An Odd Beast
This Bear Drama is a somewhat peculiar show. It creates a strong impression of the desolation that lets suspicion and bias and dark myths thrive from the native legend that bears can be controlled or possessed by the souls of humans. It avoids idealising the hardscrabble life led by the villagers, where brutality, whether that of nature or people, always looms at the periphery, waiting to erupt. Yet the personas rarely become beyond symbols – or perhaps, while the conflicts between justice and revenge, rationality and faith, virtue and wickedness escalate, representative characters in a fable – which stops the whole thing truly becoming immersive.
Stylistic Shifts
And then, exist numerous stylistically clashing instances in which the clergyman’s skill to discover clues and determine the maid’s destiny turns nearly laughable. He positions himself observing shattered containers and clumps of hair in hay barns as a fusion of Hercule Poirot and Sherlock Holmes – with Jussi a rather hapless Hastings-cum-Watson (neither of whom were required to taste a mixture of blood spatter and the boss’s spit to agree that indeed, it was clearly dried blood at the crime scene), before announcing his latest deduction and extracting a corpse from a bog.
Clashing Agendas
The village elite are determined proving that Hilda was killed by a bear, maybe to preserve the peace, or possibly to protect one of their own. The pastor is intent on proving otherwise, and the proof so rapidly stacks up supporting his view that once more the drama’s plausibility and audience tolerance are tested. 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 competing attractions and fears presented by rational thought and religion. At its worst, it resembles Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Nevertheless, it does seem to offer the answer to that debated question: “Ladies, take the bear.”
The series streams on Disney+ currently.
