An intense discussion recently went viral on social media, after a user asked the question to women: would you rather be lost in the woods alongside a male or with a bear? Like all the most engaging thought experiments, it exposed vastly opposing worldviews and life encounters, illuminated divides between the sexes, and could easily cause a deep personal dilemma if you thought on it for too long. There was also the predictable coda where some males came online to inform females how stupid they were to select the animal and proceeded to limn the consequences they deserved for that choice. This at least allowed those females who had been hesitating about their decision to decide with renewed assurance.
Portraying the Setup
The Bear-Cooking Tale skillfully brings to life this nifty little setup. This six-episode drama is adapted on Swedish author the novelist’s 2018 novel with the identical title (translated in 2020 for English readers). It follows the tribulations of a pastor (the lead actor) and his household as they come to start a new ministry within Kengis, an isolated village in northern Sweden, in 1852. Within a community with few pleasures, not one of the inhabitants particularly appreciate his puritanical approach to alcohol and revelry, yet it is his defense of the poor – especially the indigenous Sami, from among whom comes the preacher’s foster child the youth Jussi (the young actor) – and his conviction in social justice and equal rights that sets him in direct opposition with the Kengis local authorities.
The Opposing Forces
Quickly in cahoots opposing him include the lawman the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the fearsome mill owner Madam Sjödahl (Pernilla August), seen initially dismissing a newly injured laborer with minimal compensation as he remains babbling upon seeing of his pulped hand, and anyone else who profit from a populace easily swayed for a few bottles of liquor sold by the unsettling shopkeeper the merchant Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). However, in fairness, Lindmark’s creepiness pales when itinerant painter the artist Beronius arrives in the story (the performer, providing a performance of exceptional discomfiting power). While they remain – similar to the clergyman – only a little more being stereotypes, they are at least effective ones.
Plot Progression
Once the foundations of conflict sown, it is time to get down to narrative business. The servant employed by the doctor, the character Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), duly vanishes in the forest. Indications of her escape and animal scratches on a tree are found but she is nowhere to be seen. Gossip and fears of a man/maid-eating bear prowling the woodland spread, but the pastor holds a different view that he and Jussi set out to verify.
An Odd Beast
This Bear Drama is a somewhat odd beast. It conjures a strong impression of the desolation that lets distrust and bias and grim legends flourish from the native legend that animals might be dominated or inhabited by the souls of humans. It avoids idealising the hardscrabble life experienced by the residents, in which brutality, be it from the wild or mankind, always looms on the edges, poised to explode. Yet the personas rarely become beyond symbols – or maybe, as the struggles amid fairness and vengeance, rationality and faith, virtue and evil intensify, emblematic figures within a moral tale – preventing the whole thing fully coming to life.
Stylistic Shifts
Additionally, exist the many stylistically clashing instances where the pastor’s ability to discover clues and determine the maid’s destiny becomes nearly laughable. He stands looking at broken milk pots and clumps of hair within storage sheds as a fusion of the Belgian detective and Sherlock Holmes – with Jussi a rather hapless assistant figure (neither of whom had to lick a mixture of blood spatter and saliva from his superior to agree that, yes, it was clearly dried blood on the site), before announcing his newest conclusion and pulling a body from a bog.
Clashing Agendas
The village elite are determined demonstrating that the maid was killed by a bear, maybe to preserve the calm, perhaps to protect a fellow elite. The pastor is intent on establishing otherwise, and the evidence so rapidly stacks up in his favour that once more the show’s credibility and audience tolerance are tested. In its finest moments, the series evokes memories of the TV version a few years ago of Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the opposing attractions and fears presented by rational thought and religion. In its low points, it resembles a bear-themed police procedural. Still, it appears to provide the answer to the earlier query: “Ladies, take the bear.”
The series is on Disney+ currently.
