A heated debate lately spread widely on social media, following someone posed a query to women: would you rather be lost in a forest alongside a male or with a bear? Similar to the most engaging thought experiments, it revealed vastly opposing perspectives and life encounters, highlighted divides among genders, and was likely to induce a deep personal dilemma if you thought about it extensively. There was also the almost inevitable follow-up where some males took to the internet to inform females how stupid they had been to select the bear and proceeded to limn the consequences they merited for it. This at least allowed the women who had been hesitating about their decision to decide with a new confidence.
Portraying the Scenario
The Bear-Cooking Tale skillfully dramatises this nifty small premise. The six-part series is adapted on Swedish author Mikael Niemi’s 2018 book with the identical title (translated in 2020 for English readers). It traces the struggles of a pastor (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his family when they arrive to begin a new ministry within Kengis, a remote village in Sweden’s north, in 1852. Within a community lacking many joys, none of the locals particularly warm to his puritanical approach to drinking and revelry, but it is his defense of the poor – especially the indigenous Sami, from among whom comes the pastor’s foster child Jussi (the young actor) – and his conviction in societal fairness and equal rights that sets him on a collision course with the Kengis local authorities.
The Antagonists
Soon collaborating against him are the lawman Brahe (the performer), the fearsome mill owner Madam Sjödahl (Pernilla August), observed initially dismissing a newly injured worker with a month’s pay while he is still gibbering at the sight of his pulped hand, and anyone else who benefit from a populace who can be bought with some containers of the whisky provided by the creepy shopkeeper Lindmark (the actor). Although, to be fair, Lindmark’s eeriness diminishes when itinerant painter the artist Beronius arrives on the scene (Simon J Berger, delivering a performance of rare unsettling intensity). While they remain – similar to the clergyman – just slightly beyond than caricatures, they are at least effective ones.
Plot Progression
Once the foundations of conflict planted, it is time to get down to narrative business. The maid employed by the doctor, the character Hilda (the actress), duly goes missing from the woods. Signs of her escape and animal scratches on a tree get discovered but she is nowhere to be seen. Gossip and fears regarding a human-devouring beast prowling the woods spread, but the pastor holds a different view that he and Jussi set out to verify.
An Odd Beast
This Bear Drama is a somewhat odd beast. It conjures a strong impression of the bleakness that allows suspicion and prejudice and grim legends thrive from the native legend that bears might be dominated or possessed by the souls of humans. It avoids idealising the tough existence experienced by the villagers, in which violence, whether that of the wild or mankind, lurks constantly on the edges, poised to explode. Yet the personas rarely become beyond symbols – or maybe, as the struggles amid fairness and vengeance, logic and faith, good and evil intensify, representative characters in a fable – preventing the whole thing truly coming to life.
Tonal Inconsistencies
Additionally, exist numerous stylistically clashing moments where the clergyman’s skill in finding evidence and determine Hilda’s fate becomes nearly laughable. He positions himself looking at broken milk pots and clumps of hair in hay barns like a combined Hercule Poirot the English sleuth – alongside Jussi a particularly unfortunate assistant figure (neither of whom were required to lick a mixture of blood droplets and the boss’s spit to agree that indeed, it was clearly dried blood on the site), before announcing his newest conclusion and extracting a corpse from a bog.
Opposing Goals
The local leaders are bent on proving that Hilda was killed by an animal, perhaps to protect the calm, perhaps to shield a fellow elite. The clergyman is intent on proving otherwise, and the proof so quickly accumulates supporting his view that again the show’s credibility and the viewer’s patience get strained. At its best, the series is reminiscent of the TV version some years back of the author’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the competing attractions and terrors presented by rational thought and belief. At its worst, it resembles a bear-themed police procedural. Nevertheless, it does seem to provide the answer to the earlier query: “Females, choose the animal.”
The series streams on Disney+ currently.
