A heated discussion recently spread widely across online platforms, following a user asked the question to women: would you rather be lost in the woods alongside a male or a bear? Like all the best thought experiments, it revealed wildly different perspectives and life encounters, highlighted divides among genders, and was likely cause a deep personal dilemma for anyone pondering on it for too long. Additionally, there came the almost inevitable follow-up in which some males took to the internet to inform women how foolish they were to select the bear and proceeded to describe the punishments they deserved for it. This at least allowed those females who had been hesitating about their decision to decide with renewed assurance.
Dramatising the Scenario
The Bear-Cooking Tale skillfully dramatises this nifty small premise. This six-episode series is based on Swedish author Mikael Niemi’s 2018 novel with the identical title (translated two years later for English readers). It traces the struggles of a pastor (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his family as they come to begin a fresh religious post in Kengis, an isolated settlement in northern Sweden, during the mid-19th century. Within a community lacking many joys, not one of the inhabitants particularly appreciate his strict approach to drinking and dancing, but it is his protection of impoverished people – particularly the native Sami population, from among whom hails the pastor’s foster child the youth Jussi (the young actor) – and his conviction in societal fairness and equal rights that places him on a collision course against the Kengis powers that be.
The Antagonists
Quickly collaborating opposing him include the lawman the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the intimidating factory proprietor the matron Sjödahl (the actress), observed initially firing a recently mangled worker with minimal compensation while he is still gibbering upon seeing his crushed hand, and anyone else who profit from a populace easily swayed for a few bottles of liquor sold by the unsettling shopkeeper Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). Although, to be fair, Lindmark’s eeriness pales when travelling artist Beronius appears on the scene (Simon J Berger, providing an acting turn of exceptional unsettling intensity). While they remain – like the pastor himself – only a little more than caricatures, they still serve as potent archetypes.
Narrative Development
Once the foundations of tension planted, the moment arrives to proceed to narrative business. The servant from the doctor’s house, Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), duly vanishes from the woods. Signs of her escape and bear markings on a tree get discovered yet she remains completely absent. Rumours and anxieties regarding a human-devouring beast prowling 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 somewhat odd beast. It conjures a fine sense of the bleakness that lets suspicion and prejudice and grim legends flourish based on local folklore that bears might be dominated or possessed by the spirits of humans. And it doesn’t romanticise the hardscrabble life experienced by the residents, in which brutality, be it from nature or mankind, always looms at the periphery, waiting to erupt. Yet the personas seldom evolve beyond symbols – or perhaps, as the struggles between justice and revenge, logic and faith, good and evil intensify, emblematic figures within a moral tale – which stops the whole thing truly coming to life.
Tonal Inconsistencies
Additionally, there are the many tonally jarring instances where the pastor’s ability to discover clues and determine Hilda’s fate becomes nearly laughable. He positions himself looking at shattered containers and clumps of hair in hay barns like a combined Hercule Poirot and Sherlock Holmes – with Jussi a rather hapless assistant figure (neither of whom were required to taste a blend of blood droplets and saliva from his superior to confirm that, yes, it was clearly dried blood on the site), prior to declaring his newest conclusion and pulling a corpse out of a swamp.
Opposing Goals
The village elite are bent on demonstrating that the maid met her end by an animal, perhaps to protect the peace, or possibly to protect one of their own. The clergyman is bent on proving otherwise, and the proof so rapidly stacks up in his favour that again the drama’s plausibility and audience tolerance are tested. In its finest moments, the series is reminiscent of the adaptation a few years ago of Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the competing allures and terrors offered by science and belief. At its worst, it’s more like Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Nevertheless, it appears to provide the response to that debated question: “Ladies, take the bear.”
The series streams on Disney+ currently.
