An heated debate recently spread widely across online platforms, after someone asked a query for females: which would you prefer find yourself stranded in a forest with a man or a bear? Similar to the best thought experiments, it exposed wildly different perspectives and experiences, highlighted divides between the sexes, and was likely cause an existential crisis for anyone pondering on it extensively. Additionally, there came the predictable coda in which some males came online to tell women how stupid they were for choosing the bear and went on to limn the consequences they deserved for that choice. This at least allowed the women who were uncertain about their decision to make it with a new confidence.
Dramatising the Scenario
The Bear-Cooking Tale skillfully dramatises this nifty small premise. The six-part series is based from Scandinavian writer Mikael Niemi’s 2018 novel of the same name (translated in 2020 for English readers). It traces the struggles of a pastor (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his household as they come to start a new ministry in Kengis, an isolated village in northern Sweden, during the mid-19th century. Within a community with few pleasures, not one of the locals particularly appreciate his strict stance on alcohol and dancing, but it is his protection of the poor – especially the native Sami population, from among whom comes the pastor’s foster child the youth Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his conviction in societal fairness and equality that places him on a collision course with the Kengis local authorities.
The Opposing Forces
Soon in cahoots against him include the lawman Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the intimidating mill owner the matron Sjödahl (Pernilla August), seen initially dismissing a recently mangled laborer with a month’s pay as he remains babbling upon seeing his crushed hand, and all others who benefit from a community who can be bought for a few bottles of the whisky sold by the unsettling store owner the merchant Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). Although, in fairness, Lindmark’s creepiness pales when itinerant painter Beronius arrives in the story (the performer, providing an acting turn of rare unsettling intensity). While they remain – similar to the clergyman – only a little more than caricatures, they are at least potent archetypes.
Narrative Development
With the seeds of tension sown, the moment arrives to get down with the storyline. The maid from the doctor’s house, Hilda (the actress), duly goes missing in the forest. Indications of her escape and animal scratches upon a trunk are found but she is completely absent. Gossip and anxieties of a man/maid-eating beast prowling the woodland circulate, yet the clergyman has another theory which he and his ward embark to verify.
An Odd Beast
This Bear Drama is a somewhat odd beast. It conjures a fine sense of the desolation that lets suspicion and bias and dark myths thrive from the native legend that bears can be controlled or possessed by the souls of men. It avoids idealising the tough existence experienced by the residents, where violence, be it from the wild or mankind, always looms at the periphery, poised to explode. But the characters seldom evolve beyond symbols – or maybe, while the conflicts amid fairness and revenge, logic and religion, good and evil intensify, emblematic figures within a moral tale – which stops the whole thing fully coming to life.
Stylistic Shifts
Additionally, exist the many tonally jarring moments in which the clergyman’s skill in finding evidence and determine the maid’s destiny becomes almost risible. He stands looking at shattered containers and clumps of hair in hay barns as a fusion of the Belgian detective and Sherlock Holmes – alongside Jussi a particularly unfortunate Hastings-cum-Watson (neither of whom had to taste a blend of blood spatter and saliva from his superior to confirm that indeed, it was clearly coagulated blood at the crime scene), before announcing his latest deduction and extracting a corpse from a bog.
Opposing Goals
The village elite are bent on demonstrating that Hilda met her end by a bear, perhaps to preserve the peace, or possibly to shield a fellow elite. The clergyman is bent on establishing otherwise, and the evidence so rapidly stacks up in his favour that again the drama’s plausibility and the viewer’s patience are tested. In its finest moments, the series is reminiscent of the TV version some years back of Sarah Perry’s the serpent tale, through its portrayal of the opposing attractions and fears offered by rational thought and belief. In its low points, it resembles a bear-themed police procedural. Still, it appears to provide the response to that debated question: “Females, choose the animal.”
The series is on Disney+ now.
