An heated discussion recently spread widely across online platforms, following someone asked the question to women: would you rather find yourself stranded in a forest with a man or with a bear? Similar to the best thought experiments, it revealed wildly different worldviews and life encounters, highlighted chasms among genders, and could easily 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 took to the internet to inform females how foolish they had been to select the bear and went on to limn the consequences they deserved for that choice. This at least enabled those females who had been hesitating over their choice to make it with renewed assurance.
Dramatising the Scenario
The Bear-Cooking Tale skillfully brings to life this nifty small premise. This six-episode drama is based from Swedish author the novelist’s 2018 novel with the identical title (rendered two years later for an English audience). It follows the tribulations of a pastor (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his family when they arrive to start a fresh religious post in Kengis, a remote settlement in northern Sweden, during the mid-19th century. In a place with few pleasures, none of the inhabitants especially warm to his strict stance on alcohol and revelry, but it is his defense of the poor – especially the indigenous Sami, from among whom hails the pastor’s adopted son the youth Jussi (the young actor) – and his conviction in social justice and equal rights that sets him in direct opposition against the Kengis local authorities.
The Antagonists
Quickly collaborating against him include the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the fearsome factory proprietor the matron Sjödahl (the actress), observed early on dismissing a recently mangled worker with a month’s pay as he remains babbling upon seeing his crushed hand, and all others who profit from a populace easily swayed with some containers of the whisky provided by the unsettling store owner Lindmark (the actor). Although, to be fair, Lindmark’s creepiness pales when travelling artist the artist Beronius appears in the story (Simon J Berger, providing an acting turn of rare unsettling intensity). If they are – similar to the clergyman – just slightly beyond being stereotypes, they still serve as potent archetypes.
Plot Progression
With the seeds of conflict planted, the moment arrives to get down to narrative business. The servant employed by the doctor, Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), accordingly goes missing from the woods. Signs of her escape and bear markings on a tree get discovered yet she remains nowhere to be seen. Gossip and anxieties of a man/maid-eating beast prowling the woods circulate, yet the clergyman holds a different view that he and Jussi embark to verify.
An Odd Beast
This Bear Drama is a slightly peculiar show. It conjures a fine sense of the bleakness that allows suspicion and bias and dark myths flourish based on local folklore that bears might be dominated or inhabited by the souls of humans. And it doesn’t idealising the hardscrabble life experienced by the residents, where violence, be it from nature or people, always looms at the periphery, poised to explode. But the characters rarely become more than ciphers – or perhaps, as the struggles amid fairness and revenge, rationality and faith, good and evil intensify, emblematic figures within a moral tale – preventing the entire production fully becoming immersive.
Stylistic Shifts
Additionally, exist numerous stylistically clashing moments where the clergyman’s skill in finding evidence and discern Hilda’s fate becomes nearly laughable. He stands observing broken milk pots and strands of fur in hay barns like a combined the Belgian detective the English sleuth – alongside Jussi a rather hapless Hastings-cum-Watson (neither of whom were required to lick a blend of blood droplets and the boss’s spit to agree that, yes, it was definitely dried blood on the site), prior to declaring his latest deduction and extracting a body out of a swamp.
Clashing Agendas
The village elite are determined demonstrating that Hilda was killed by an animal, perhaps to preserve the calm, or possibly to shield one of their own. The pastor is bent on establishing otherwise, and the proof so rapidly accumulates in his favour that again the drama’s plausibility and the viewer’s patience get strained. At its best, the series evokes memories of the adaptation a few years ago of the author’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the competing allures and fears offered by rational thought and religion. In its low points, it’s more like a bear-themed police procedural. Still, it does seem to provide the answer to that debated question: “Females, choose the animal.”
The series is on Disney+ now.
