An heated debate recently spread widely on social media, after a user posed the question for females: would you rather find yourself stranded in the woods with a man or a bear? Like all the most engaging hypothetical scenarios, it revealed wildly different perspectives and life encounters, highlighted divides among genders, and could easily cause an existential crisis for anyone pondering on it for too long. Additionally, there came the predictable follow-up where some males took to the internet to tell females how stupid they were for choosing the bear and proceeded to describe the punishments they merited for it. This at minimum allowed those females who were uncertain about their decision to decide with a new confidence.
Dramatising the Scenario
The Bear-Cooking Tale skillfully dramatises this clever small premise. This six-episode drama is based on Swedish author the novelist’s 2018 novel of the same name (rendered two years later for English readers). It traces the tribulations of a clergyman (the lead actor) and his family as they come to begin a new ministry in Kengis, an isolated village in Sweden’s north, in 1852. In a place with few pleasures, not one of the inhabitants particularly appreciate his puritanical stance on alcohol and dancing, yet it is his defense of impoverished people – especially the native Sami population, from which comes the preacher’s foster child 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 Opposing Forces
Soon collaborating opposing him are the sheriff the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the fearsome factory proprietor Madam Sjödahl (the actress), observed initially firing a recently mangled worker with a month’s pay while he is still gibbering at the sight his crushed hand, and anyone else who benefit from a populace who can be bought with some containers of liquor provided by the unsettling shopkeeper the merchant Lindmark (the actor). Although, to be fair, Lindmark’s eeriness diminishes when travelling artist Beronius appears in the story (Simon J Berger, delivering an acting turn of rare discomfiting power). If they are – similar to the clergyman – only a little more than caricatures, they still serve as potent archetypes.
Plot Progression
Once the foundations of tension sown, it is time to get down to narrative business. The servant from the doctor’s house, the character Hilda (the actress), duly goes missing from the woods. Indications of her flight and animal scratches on a tree get discovered yet she remains completely absent. Rumours and anxieties of a man/maid-eating beast roaming the woodland spread, but the pastor holds a different view that he and Jussi embark to verify.
A Strange Creation
This Bear Drama is a slightly odd beast. It conjures a strong impression of the desolation that lets suspicion and bias and dark myths thrive based on local folklore that animals can be controlled or inhabited by the spirits of men. It avoids romanticise the tough existence experienced by the residents, where violence, whether that of the wild or mankind, always looms at the periphery, waiting to erupt. But the characters seldom evolve more than ciphers – or maybe, as the struggles between justice and vengeance, logic and religion, virtue and wickedness intensify, emblematic figures within a moral tale – which stops the whole thing truly becoming immersive.
Stylistic Shifts
Additionally, exist numerous stylistically clashing moments where the pastor’s ability in finding evidence and discern the maid’s destiny becomes nearly laughable. He stands observing broken milk pots and clumps of hair in hay barns as a fusion of Hercule Poirot the English sleuth – with Jussi a rather hapless Hastings-cum-Watson (none of whom were required to lick a blend of blood droplets and saliva from his superior to confirm that indeed, it was clearly dried blood at the crime scene), before announcing his latest deduction and pulling a corpse out of a swamp.
Clashing Agendas
The local leaders are determined demonstrating that the maid met her end by a bear, maybe to preserve the peace, perhaps to protect a fellow elite. The pastor is bent on proving the opposite, and the evidence so rapidly stacks up in his favour that once more the drama’s plausibility and audience tolerance get strained. At its best, the series is reminiscent of the TV version a few years ago of Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the opposing allures and fears presented by rational thought and religion. At its worst, it resembles a bear-themed police procedural. Still, it does seem to offer the answer to that debated question: “Ladies, take the bear.”
The series streams on Disney+ currently.
