A intense discussion recently spread widely across online platforms, following a user posed a query for females: which would you prefer be lost in a forest with a man or with a bear? Similar to the best thought experiments, it exposed vastly opposing perspectives and life encounters, highlighted chasms among genders, and was likely to induce an existential crisis for anyone pondering on it extensively. Additionally, there came the predictable coda in which men of a certain stripe took to the internet to tell females how foolish they had been to select the bear and went on to limn the punishments they deserved for it. 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 effectively dramatises this nifty little setup. This six-episode drama is adapted on Swedish author Mikael Niemi’s 2018 novel with the identical title (rendered in 2020 for an English audience). It follows the struggles of a pastor (the lead actor) and his household when they arrive to begin a fresh religious post in Kengis, an isolated village in northern Sweden, during the mid-19th century. Within a community lacking many joys, none of the inhabitants especially warm to his strict stance on drinking and revelry, but it is his defense of impoverished people – especially the native Sami population, from among whom hails the pastor’s adopted son Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in societal fairness and equal rights that sets him in direct opposition against the Kengis powers that be.
The Antagonists
Soon collaborating opposing him are the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the intimidating factory proprietor Madam Sjödahl (Pernilla August), observed initially dismissing a recently mangled worker with a month’s pay as he remains gibbering upon seeing his crushed hand, and all others who profit from a populace who can be bought with some containers of the whisky sold by the unsettling shopkeeper Lindmark (the actor). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s eeriness pales when travelling artist the artist Beronius appears on the scene (the performer, delivering an acting turn of exceptional discomfiting power). If they are – similar to the clergyman – only a little more than caricatures, they are at least effective ones.
Narrative Development
Once the foundations of tension sown, it is time to get down with the storyline. The servant from the doctor’s house, the character Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), duly goes missing in the forest. Indications of her escape and bear markings upon a trunk get discovered yet she remains nowhere to be seen. Gossip and fears regarding a human-devouring beast prowling the woods circulate, but the pastor has another theory which he and his ward set out to prove.
A Strange Creation
This Bear Drama is a somewhat odd beast. It conjures a strong impression of the desolation that allows suspicion and bias and grim legends flourish based on local folklore that animals might be dominated or possessed by the spirits of humans. And it doesn’t romanticise the tough existence led by the residents, where brutality, be it from the wild or mankind, always looms at the periphery, poised to explode. Yet the personas rarely become beyond symbols – or maybe, while the conflicts amid fairness and vengeance, logic and faith, good and wickedness escalate, emblematic figures in a fable – which stops the whole thing fully coming to life.
Tonal Inconsistencies
Additionally, there are the many tonally jarring instances where the clergyman’s skill to discover clues and determine Hilda’s fate becomes nearly laughable. He stands looking at broken milk pots and strands of fur in hay barns like a combined the Belgian detective the English sleuth – with Jussi a rather hapless Hastings-cum-Watson (none of whom had to lick a mixture of blood spatter and saliva from his superior to confirm that, yes, it was definitely dried blood at the crime scene), prior to declaring his latest deduction and extracting a body out of a swamp.
Opposing Goals
The village elite are bent on proving that Hilda met her end by a bear, maybe to preserve the peace, or possibly to protect a fellow elite. The pastor is intent on establishing the opposite, and the evidence so rapidly stacks up in his favour that again the drama’s plausibility and audience tolerance are tested. At its best, the series evokes memories of the TV version some years back of the author’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the opposing allures and terrors offered by rational thought and religion. In its low points, it’s more like a bear-themed police procedural. Nevertheless, it appears to provide the response to that debated question: “Ladies, take the bear.”
The series is on Disney+ currently.
