A intense discussion recently spread widely across online platforms, after someone asked the question to women: which would you prefer find yourself stranded in a forest alongside a male or with a bear? Like all the most engaging hypothetical scenarios, it exposed wildly different worldviews and experiences, highlighted chasms among genders, and could easily cause a deep personal dilemma for anyone pondering about it for too long. Additionally, there came the almost inevitable follow-up where men of a certain stripe came online to inform women how foolish they were to select the bear and proceeded to describe the consequences they deserved for that choice. This at least enabled those females who were uncertain over their choice to decide with renewed assurance.
Portraying the Scenario
The Bear-Cooking Tale skillfully dramatises this clever small premise. The six-part drama is adapted on Swedish author Mikael Niemi’s 2018 book 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 begin a new ministry within Kengis, a remote village in northern Sweden, during the mid-19th century. In a place lacking many joys, not one of the inhabitants particularly appreciate his strict approach to drinking and revelry, yet it is his protection of impoverished people – especially the native Sami population, from among whom comes the pastor’s foster child Jussi (the young actor) – and his belief in societal fairness and equal rights that sets him in direct opposition with the Kengis local authorities.
The Opposing Forces
Soon in cahoots opposing him are the sheriff the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the intimidating factory proprietor the matron Sjödahl (Pernilla August), seen early on dismissing a newly injured worker with minimal compensation as he remains babbling at the sight his crushed hand, and anyone else who profit from a community who can be bought for a few bottles of liquor sold by the creepy store owner Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). Although, in fairness, Lindmark’s creepiness diminishes once travelling artist the artist Beronius appears on the scene (the performer, providing a performance of rare discomfiting power). If they are – similar to the clergyman – just slightly beyond than caricatures, they are at least potent archetypes.
Narrative Development
Once the foundations of tension planted, the moment arrives to proceed to narrative business. The maid employed by the doctor, Hilda (the actress), accordingly vanishes in the forest. Indications of her escape and animal scratches upon a trunk get discovered yet she remains nowhere to be seen. Rumours and anxieties of a man/maid-eating beast roaming the woodland circulate, but the pastor has another theory that he and Jussi set out 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 from the native legend that bears might be dominated or inhabited by the spirits of humans. And it doesn’t idealising the hardscrabble life led by the residents, where brutality, be it from nature or people, lurks constantly on the edges, waiting to erupt. But the characters seldom evolve beyond symbols – or maybe, while the conflicts between justice and vengeance, logic and religion, good and wickedness escalate, emblematic figures in a fable – which stops the whole thing fully becoming immersive.
Tonal Inconsistencies
Additionally, exist numerous stylistically clashing instances where the pastor’s ability to discover clues and determine Hilda’s fate becomes nearly laughable. He positions himself observing broken milk pots and clumps of hair within storage sheds as a fusion of Hercule Poirot and Sherlock Holmes – with Jussi a particularly unfortunate Hastings-cum-Watson (neither of whom had to taste a mixture of blood spatter and the boss’s spit to confirm that, yes, it was definitely dried blood at the crime scene), prior to declaring his latest deduction and pulling a corpse out of a swamp.
Clashing Agendas
The local leaders are determined demonstrating that the maid met her end by an animal, maybe to preserve the calm, perhaps to shield one of their own. The clergyman is bent on establishing the opposite, and the proof so quickly stacks up in his favour that again the show’s credibility and audience tolerance get strained. In its finest moments, the series is reminiscent of the TV version some years back of the author’s the serpent tale, with its evocation of the competing allures and fears offered by science and belief. In its low points, it’s more like a bear-themed police procedural. Still, it does seem to provide the response to that debated question: “Ladies, take the bear.”
The series is on Disney+ now.
