A heated discussion recently spread widely across online platforms, after someone asked a query for females: which would you prefer be lost in a forest alongside a male or a bear? Similar to the most engaging hypothetical scenarios, it exposed wildly different worldviews and experiences, highlighted chasms among genders, and was likely to induce a deep personal dilemma for anyone pondering about it extensively. Additionally, there came the predictable follow-up in which some males took to the internet to tell women how stupid they had been for choosing the bear and proceeded to describe the consequences they deserved for it. This at minimum enabled those females who had been hesitating over their choice to make it with renewed assurance.
Dramatising the Setup
The Bear-Cooking Tale effectively dramatises this clever little setup. The six-part drama is based from Swedish author the novelist’s 2018 novel with the identical title (translated in 2020 for an English audience). It traces the tribulations of a clergyman (the lead actor) and his household as they come to start a new ministry in Kengis, an isolated village in northern Sweden, in 1852. In a place with few pleasures, none of the locals especially warm to his puritanical approach to alcohol and revelry, yet it is his protection of impoverished people – especially the indigenous Sami, from among whom comes the pastor’s adopted son the youth Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in social justice and equality that places him on a collision course with the Kengis local authorities.
The Antagonists
Quickly collaborating opposing him are the sheriff the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the fearsome mill owner Madam Sjödahl (Pernilla August), observed early on dismissing a newly injured laborer with minimal compensation as he remains babbling at the sight of his pulped hand, and all others who benefit from a populace easily swayed for a few bottles of liquor sold by the creepy store owner Lindmark (the actor). Although, in fairness, Lindmark’s eeriness pales when itinerant painter Beronius arrives in the story (the performer, providing an acting turn of rare discomfiting power). While they remain – like the pastor himself – only a little more than caricatures, they still serve as potent archetypes.
Plot Progression
With the seeds of conflict sown, the moment arrives to get down with the storyline. The servant employed by the doctor, Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), duly vanishes from the woods. Indications of her flight and bear markings upon a trunk are found but she is completely absent. Rumours and fears of a man/maid-eating bear prowling the woods circulate, but the pastor 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 conjures a fine sense of the bleakness that allows distrust and bias and grim legends thrive based on local folklore that animals can be controlled or possessed by the spirits of humans. And it doesn’t idealising the hardscrabble life experienced by the villagers, where brutality, whether that of nature or mankind, lurks constantly at the periphery, waiting to erupt. Yet the personas rarely become beyond symbols – or maybe, as the struggles amid fairness and revenge, rationality and religion, good and wickedness escalate, representative characters within a moral tale – preventing the entire production truly becoming immersive.
Tonal Inconsistencies
And then, there are the many stylistically clashing moments where the clergyman’s skill to discover clues and discern Hilda’s fate becomes almost risible. He stands observing broken milk pots and strands of fur in hay barns like a combined the Belgian detective and Sherlock Holmes – with Jussi a rather hapless Hastings-cum-Watson (none of whom were required to lick a blend of blood spatter and the boss’s spit to confirm that, yes, it was definitely dried blood at the crime scene), before announcing his newest conclusion and extracting a corpse out of a swamp.
Clashing Agendas
The village elite are determined demonstrating that Hilda was killed by a bear, perhaps to protect the calm, or possibly to protect a fellow elite. The pastor is intent on establishing otherwise, and the proof so quickly stacks up in his favour that again the drama’s plausibility and audience tolerance get strained. At its best, the series is reminiscent of the adaptation some years back of the author’s The Essex Serpent, through its portrayal of the competing allures and terrors offered by rational thought and religion. In its low points, it resembles a bear-themed police procedural. Nevertheless, it does seem to provide the answer to that debated question: “Females, choose the animal.”
The series is on Disney+ now.
