A intense discussion recently spread widely across online platforms, following a user posed a query for females: would you rather be lost in the woods alongside a male or a bear? Like all the best hypothetical scenarios, it revealed vastly opposing worldviews and experiences, highlighted chasms among genders, and could easily to induce a deep personal dilemma if you thought about it for too long. There was also the predictable coda where men of a certain stripe came online to inform women how stupid they had been for choosing the bear and went on to limn the consequences they deserved for that choice. This at minimum enabled those females who had been hesitating about their decision to decide with renewed assurance.
Portraying the Scenario
The Bear-Cooking Tale effectively dramatises this clever small premise. This six-episode series is based on Scandinavian writer Mikael Niemi’s 2018 novel with the identical title (translated in 2020 for an English audience). It traces the tribulations of a pastor (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his household as they come to begin a new ministry in Kengis, a remote village in Sweden’s north, in 1852. In a place lacking many joys, none of the inhabitants especially warm to his strict stance on drinking and revelry, yet it is his defense of the poor – particularly the indigenous Sami, from among whom hails the preacher’s adopted son the youth Jussi (the young actor) – and his conviction in societal fairness and equality that places him on a collision course with the Kengis powers that be.
The Opposing Forces
Soon in cahoots opposing him are the sheriff the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the fearsome factory proprietor the matron Sjödahl (Pernilla August), observed early on firing a newly injured laborer with a month’s pay as he remains gibbering upon seeing 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 (the actor). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s eeriness diminishes when itinerant painter Beronius arrives on the scene (Simon J Berger, delivering a performance of exceptional unsettling intensity). If they are – like the pastor himself – just slightly beyond being stereotypes, they are at least potent archetypes.
Narrative Development
With the seeds of conflict planted, it is time to get down to narrative business. The servant employed by the doctor, Hilda (the actress), duly goes missing in the forest. Signs of her flight and bear markings upon a trunk get discovered but she is nowhere to be seen. Rumours and fears regarding a human-devouring beast prowling the woodland circulate, 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 fine sense of the bleakness that lets suspicion and bias and dark myths flourish based on local folklore that bears can be controlled or possessed by the souls of humans. It avoids romanticise the tough existence experienced by the villagers, where brutality, be it from the wild or people, lurks constantly on the edges, poised to explode. Yet the personas seldom evolve beyond symbols – or perhaps, while the conflicts amid fairness and vengeance, rationality and religion, virtue and wickedness intensify, emblematic figures in a fable – which stops the whole thing truly coming to life.
Stylistic Shifts
Additionally, there are the many stylistically clashing instances in which the pastor’s ability in finding evidence and discern the maid’s destiny turns nearly laughable. He positions himself observing broken milk pots and strands of fur in hay barns like a combined Hercule Poirot and Sherlock Holmes – with Jussi a rather hapless assistant figure (neither of whom had to taste a blend of blood droplets and saliva from his superior to agree that, yes, it was clearly dried blood at the crime scene), before announcing his newest conclusion and extracting a corpse from a bog.
Clashing Agendas
The village elite are determined proving that Hilda met her end by a bear, maybe to preserve the calm, or possibly to protect a fellow elite. The pastor is bent on proving the opposite, and the evidence so quickly accumulates supporting his view that once more the show’s credibility and the viewer’s patience are tested. At its best, the series is reminiscent of the adaptation some years back of the author’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the opposing allures and terrors offered by rational thought and belief. In its low points, it’s more like Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Still, it appears to offer the response to that debated question: “Females, choose the animal.”
The series streams on Disney+ currently.
