An heated discussion recently went viral across online platforms, following a user posed a query for females: would you rather find yourself stranded in the woods alongside a male or a bear? Like all the most engaging thought experiments, it exposed wildly different worldviews and life encounters, highlighted divides between the sexes, and was likely to induce a deep personal dilemma if you thought about it extensively. There was also the predictable coda in which men of a certain stripe came online to tell females how foolish they were for choosing the animal and went on to describe the punishments they merited for it. This at minimum enabled the women who had been hesitating over their choice to decide with renewed assurance.
Portraying the Scenario
The Bear-Cooking Tale skillfully dramatises this clever small premise. This six-episode drama is adapted from Scandinavian writer Mikael Niemi’s 2018 novel of the same name (translated in 2020 for English readers). It traces the tribulations of a clergyman (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his family as they come to start a fresh religious post in Kengis, a remote settlement in Sweden’s north, during the mid-19th century. In a place lacking many joys, none of the locals particularly appreciate his strict stance on drinking and dancing, but it is his defense of the poor – particularly the native Sami population, from among whom comes the preacher’s adopted son 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 against him include the sheriff the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the fearsome factory proprietor Madam Sjödahl (Pernilla August), seen initially firing a newly injured worker with a month’s pay as he remains babbling at the sight his crushed hand, and anyone else who benefit from a community easily swayed with some containers of the whisky provided by the unsettling store owner the merchant Lindmark (the actor). Although, to be fair, Lindmark’s creepiness diminishes once travelling artist Beronius arrives in the story (Simon J Berger, delivering a performance of rare unsettling intensity). While they remain – like the pastor himself – only a little more than caricatures, they are at least effective ones.
Plot Progression
Once the foundations of tension sown, the moment arrives to get down with the storyline. The servant employed by the doctor, the character Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), duly vanishes in the forest. Indications of her flight and animal scratches upon a trunk get discovered but she is nowhere to be seen. Gossip and anxieties of a man/maid-eating bear roaming the woods spread, yet the clergyman holds a different view which he and his ward embark to prove.
An Odd Beast
This Bear Drama is a somewhat peculiar show. It conjures a fine sense of the bleakness that lets suspicion and bias and dark myths flourish based on local folklore that animals can be controlled or possessed by the spirits of humans. And it doesn’t idealising the hardscrabble life led by the villagers, where brutality, whether that of nature or mankind, always looms at the periphery, poised to explode. But the characters rarely become more than ciphers – or maybe, as the struggles amid fairness and revenge, logic and religion, good and wickedness escalate, emblematic figures in a fable – preventing the whole thing fully coming to life.
Stylistic Shifts
And then, there are numerous tonally jarring moments in which the clergyman’s skill in finding evidence and discern the maid’s destiny becomes nearly laughable. He stands observing broken milk pots and clumps of hair within storage sheds like a combined the Belgian detective the English sleuth – alongside Jussi a rather hapless Hastings-cum-Watson (neither of whom had to lick a mixture of blood spatter and the boss’s spit to confirm that, yes, it was definitely coagulated blood at the crime scene), prior to declaring his newest conclusion and extracting a body out of a swamp.
Clashing Agendas
The village elite are determined demonstrating that Hilda met her end by an animal, perhaps to protect the peace, or possibly to protect a fellow elite. The pastor is bent on establishing otherwise, and the proof so rapidly stacks up supporting his view that once more the drama’s plausibility and audience tolerance get strained. At its best, the series evokes memories of the TV version some years back of Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, through its portrayal of the competing allures and terrors offered by rational thought and religion. In its low points, it resembles a bear-themed police procedural. Nevertheless, it appears to provide the response to that debated question: “Females, choose the animal.”
The series is on Disney+ currently.
