An intense discussion recently spread widely across online platforms, after someone asked a query for females: which would you prefer find yourself stranded in a forest alongside a male or a bear? Like all the best thought experiments, it revealed vastly opposing worldviews and life encounters, illuminated divides between the sexes, and was likely cause an existential crisis for anyone pondering about it extensively. Additionally, there came the predictable follow-up in which some males came online to inform women how stupid they had been to select the animal and went on to describe the consequences they merited for that choice. This at minimum allowed those females who had been hesitating about their decision to make it with a new confidence.
Dramatising the Scenario
The Bear-Cooking Tale skillfully brings to life this clever little setup. The six-part series is adapted on Scandinavian writer Mikael Niemi’s 2018 book with the identical title (translated in 2020 for an English audience). It follows the tribulations of a pastor (the lead actor) and his family when they arrive to start a fresh religious post in Kengis, an isolated village in Sweden’s north, in 1852. In a place lacking many joys, none of the inhabitants especially appreciate his strict approach to alcohol and revelry, but it is his defense of the poor – especially the native Sami population, from among whom comes the pastor’s foster child the youth Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in social justice and equality that sets him on a collision course with the Kengis local authorities.
The Antagonists
Quickly collaborating against him are the lawman Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the intimidating mill owner the matron Sjödahl (Pernilla August), observed initially dismissing a recently mangled worker with minimal compensation as he remains gibbering at the sight of his pulped hand, and all others who profit from a populace who can be bought for a few bottles of the whisky provided by the creepy store owner Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s creepiness diminishes when itinerant painter the artist Beronius arrives on the scene (the performer, delivering an acting turn of exceptional unsettling intensity). If they are – like the pastor himself – only a little more being stereotypes, they are at least potent archetypes.
Plot Progression
Once the foundations of tension sown, the moment arrives to get down to narrative business. The servant from the doctor’s house, the character Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), accordingly vanishes from the woods. Indications of her flight and bear markings upon a trunk are found yet she remains nowhere to be seen. Rumours and fears regarding a human-devouring beast prowling the woodland circulate, but the pastor has another theory that he and Jussi set out to prove.
A Strange Creation
This Bear Drama is a somewhat peculiar show. It creates a strong impression of the bleakness that allows distrust and bias and grim legends thrive from the native legend that bears can be controlled or inhabited by the spirits of men. And it doesn’t romanticise the hardscrabble life experienced by the villagers, in which brutality, be it from nature or mankind, always looms at the periphery, poised to explode. But the characters rarely become beyond symbols – or maybe, as the struggles amid fairness and revenge, rationality and religion, good and evil escalate, emblematic figures in a fable – preventing the whole thing fully becoming immersive.
Tonal Inconsistencies
And then, exist the many stylistically clashing instances in which the clergyman’s skill to discover clues and discern the maid’s destiny turns nearly laughable. He stands observing shattered containers and clumps of hair in hay barns like a combined Hercule Poirot and Sherlock Holmes – with Jussi a rather hapless Hastings-cum-Watson (none of whom had to lick a mixture of blood spatter and saliva from his superior to confirm that indeed, it was clearly coagulated blood on the site), prior to declaring his newest conclusion and extracting a corpse from a bog.
Opposing Goals
The village elite are bent on proving that Hilda was killed by a bear, perhaps to preserve the peace, or possibly to shield a fellow elite. The pastor is intent on proving otherwise, and the proof so quickly accumulates in his favour that once more the show’s credibility and audience tolerance get strained. In its finest moments, the series evokes memories of the TV version a few years ago of the author’s The Essex Serpent, through its portrayal of the opposing allures and fears offered by rational thought and belief. At its worst, it resembles Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Still, it appears to offer the response to the earlier query: “Females, choose the animal.”
The series streams on Disney+ currently.
