An intense debate lately spread widely across online platforms, following a user posed a query for females: which would you prefer be lost in a forest alongside a male or with a bear? Like all the most engaging thought experiments, it revealed vastly opposing perspectives and life encounters, illuminated chasms between the sexes, and could easily cause a deep personal dilemma if you thought on it extensively. Additionally, there came the predictable coda where some males took to the internet to tell women how stupid they were to select the animal and proceeded to limn the punishments they deserved for that choice. This at least allowed the women who were uncertain over their choice to make it with renewed assurance.
Dramatising the Setup
The Bear-Cooking Tale skillfully dramatises this nifty small premise. The six-part series is based on Scandinavian writer Mikael Niemi’s 2018 book of the same name (translated in 2020 for English readers). It traces the tribulations of a clergyman (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his family when they arrive to begin a fresh religious post in Kengis, a remote village in Sweden’s north, during the mid-19th century. Within a community lacking many joys, none of the locals particularly warm to his puritanical approach to drinking and revelry, yet it is his protection of impoverished people – particularly the indigenous Sami, from which hails the pastor’s foster child the youth Jussi (the young actor) – and his conviction in societal fairness and equal rights that places him in direct opposition with the Kengis powers that be.
The Antagonists
Soon collaborating against him include the sheriff the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the fearsome mill owner the matron Sjödahl (Pernilla August), observed initially dismissing a recently mangled laborer with a month’s pay while he is still gibbering at the sight his crushed hand, and all others who benefit from a populace who can be bought for a few bottles of the whisky provided by the creepy shopkeeper Lindmark (the actor). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s eeriness diminishes when itinerant painter the artist Beronius appears on the scene (Simon J Berger, providing a performance of exceptional discomfiting power). If they are – similar to the clergyman – only a little more than caricatures, they are at least effective ones.
Plot Progression
Once the foundations of conflict planted, it is time to proceed with the storyline. The maid from the doctor’s house, Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), accordingly goes missing from the woods. Signs of her escape and animal scratches on a tree are found yet she remains nowhere to be seen. Gossip and fears of a man/maid-eating beast roaming the woodland spread, yet the clergyman holds a different view which he and his ward set out to prove.
A Strange Creation
This Bear Drama is a somewhat odd beast. It creates a fine sense of the desolation that lets suspicion and bias and grim legends thrive based on local folklore that bears can be controlled or possessed by the spirits of humans. And it doesn’t idealising the tough existence led by the villagers, where violence, be it from the wild or mankind, lurks constantly at the periphery, poised to explode. But the characters seldom evolve more than ciphers – or maybe, as the struggles between justice and revenge, logic and religion, virtue and evil escalate, representative characters in a fable – which stops the whole thing truly coming to life.
Stylistic Shifts
Additionally, exist numerous stylistically clashing instances in which the clergyman’s skill in finding evidence and determine Hilda’s fate becomes nearly laughable. He stands looking at shattered containers and clumps of hair within storage sheds like a combined the Belgian detective the English sleuth – alongside Jussi a particularly unfortunate assistant figure (neither of whom were required to taste a blend of blood spatter and the boss’s spit to agree that, yes, it was definitely coagulated blood on the site), before announcing his latest deduction and pulling a body from a bog.
Opposing Goals
The village elite are determined demonstrating that the maid met her end by an animal, maybe to protect the peace, perhaps to shield a fellow elite. The pastor is intent on proving otherwise, and the evidence so quickly stacks up supporting his view that once more the drama’s plausibility and the viewer’s patience are tested. In its finest moments, the series evokes memories of the TV version some years back of Sarah Perry’s the serpent tale, through its portrayal of the competing allures and fears presented by rational thought and belief. In its low points, it resembles a bear-themed police procedural. Nevertheless, it does seem to provide the answer to that debated question: “Ladies, take the bear.”
The series streams on Disney+ currently.
