An intense debate lately spread widely on social media, following a user posed a query to women: which would you prefer be lost in the woods alongside a male or with a bear? Like all the most engaging hypothetical scenarios, it revealed wildly different worldviews and experiences, highlighted divides between the sexes, and could easily cause a deep personal dilemma if you thought on it for too long. There was also the almost inevitable coda where some males came online to inform women how foolish they were to select the bear and went on to describe the consequences they merited for it. This at minimum enabled the women who were uncertain over their choice to decide with renewed assurance.
Portraying the Setup
The Bear-Cooking Tale effectively dramatises this clever little setup. The six-part series is based from Scandinavian writer Mikael Niemi’s 2018 book with the identical title (rendered in 2020 for an English audience). It follows the struggles of a pastor (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his household when they arrive to begin a fresh religious post in Kengis, an isolated village in Sweden’s north, in 1852. In a place with few pleasures, not one of the locals particularly appreciate his strict approach to drinking and dancing, but it is his defense of impoverished people – particularly the indigenous Sami, from among whom comes the pastor’s foster child Jussi (the young actor) – and his belief in societal fairness and equality that places him on a collision course against the Kengis powers that be.
The Opposing Forces
Quickly in cahoots against him include the sheriff the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the fearsome factory proprietor the matron Sjödahl (Pernilla August), seen early on firing a newly injured worker with a month’s pay as he remains babbling at the sight his crushed hand, and all others who benefit from a community easily swayed with some containers of the whisky sold by the unsettling store owner the merchant Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). Although, to be fair, Lindmark’s eeriness pales once travelling artist Beronius appears in the story (Simon J Berger, providing an acting turn of exceptional unsettling intensity). While they remain – similar to the clergyman – just slightly beyond being stereotypes, they still serve as effective ones.
Plot Progression
Once the foundations of tension sown, the moment arrives to proceed to narrative business. The servant from the doctor’s house, the character Hilda (the actress), duly goes missing from the woods. Signs of her flight and bear markings upon a trunk get discovered but she is completely absent. Rumours and fears regarding a human-devouring bear prowling the woods spread, but the pastor holds a different view that he and Jussi embark to verify.
A Strange Creation
This Bear Drama is a somewhat odd beast. It creates a strong impression of the bleakness that allows distrust and bias and grim legends flourish based on local folklore that bears might be dominated or possessed by the souls of humans. And it doesn’t romanticise the tough existence led by the residents, in which violence, whether that of nature or people, always looms on the edges, poised to explode. But the characters seldom evolve beyond symbols – or maybe, as the struggles between justice and revenge, logic and faith, virtue and evil escalate, emblematic figures within a moral tale – preventing the whole thing truly coming to life.
Stylistic Shifts
And then, exist numerous tonally jarring moments where the pastor’s ability to discover clues and determine Hilda’s fate turns 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 had to lick a mixture of blood droplets and saliva from his superior to agree that, yes, it was definitely coagulated blood at the crime scene), prior to declaring his latest deduction and extracting a corpse out of a swamp.
Clashing Agendas
The local leaders are bent on demonstrating that the maid met her end by an animal, maybe to protect the calm, perhaps to protect one of their own. The clergyman is intent on establishing the opposite, and the proof so quickly stacks up in his favour that again the drama’s plausibility and the viewer’s patience are tested. In its finest moments, the series evokes memories of the adaptation some years back of the author’s the serpent tale, through its portrayal of the competing allures and terrors presented by science and religion. In its low points, it resembles Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Still, it appears to offer the response to the earlier query: “Ladies, take the bear.”
The series is on Disney+ now.
