A heated discussion recently went viral on social media, after a user posed a query to women: would you rather be lost in the woods alongside a male or with a bear? Similar to the best hypothetical scenarios, it exposed wildly different worldviews and life encounters, highlighted divides among genders, and was likely to induce a deep personal dilemma for anyone pondering on it for too long. Additionally, there came the almost inevitable follow-up where men of a certain stripe came online to tell women how foolish they were for choosing the bear and went on to limn the punishments they deserved for it. This at minimum enabled the women who were uncertain over their choice to make it with a new confidence.
Dramatising the Scenario
The Bear-Cooking Tale skillfully dramatises this clever small premise. The six-part drama is adapted from Swedish author Mikael Niemi’s 2018 novel with the identical title (rendered two years later for an English audience). It follows the tribulations of a clergyman (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his household as they come to start a new ministry within Kengis, an isolated village in northern Sweden, in 1852. Within a community lacking many joys, none of the inhabitants especially warm to his puritanical approach to drinking and revelry, yet it is his defense of impoverished people – especially the native Sami population, from among whom hails the pastor’s adopted son Jussi (the young actor) – and his belief in social justice and equality that sets him in direct opposition against the Kengis powers that be.
The Antagonists
Quickly in cahoots against him include the lawman Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the fearsome factory proprietor the matron Sjödahl (Pernilla August), seen initially firing a recently mangled worker with minimal compensation while he is still babbling upon seeing his crushed hand, and all others who benefit from a community who can be bought for a few bottles of liquor sold by the unsettling store owner Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). Although, in fairness, Lindmark’s creepiness pales when itinerant painter the artist Beronius appears in the story (the performer, delivering an acting turn of rare discomfiting power). While they remain – similar to the clergyman – just slightly beyond being stereotypes, they are at least effective ones.
Plot Progression
With the seeds of conflict sown, the moment arrives to get down with the storyline. The maid from the doctor’s house, Hilda (the actress), accordingly goes missing from the woods. Indications of her flight and animal scratches upon a trunk are found but she is nowhere to be seen. Rumours and anxieties of a man/maid-eating bear roaming the woodland 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 desolation that lets distrust and bias and grim legends thrive from the native legend that animals can be controlled or possessed by the spirits of men. It avoids romanticise the hardscrabble life experienced by the residents, where brutality, be it from nature or people, lurks constantly on the edges, waiting to erupt. But the characters rarely become more than ciphers – or perhaps, as the struggles between justice and revenge, rationality and religion, virtue and wickedness intensify, representative characters within a moral tale – which stops the entire production truly coming to life.
Stylistic Shifts
Additionally, exist the many tonally jarring moments in which the clergyman’s skill in finding evidence and determine Hilda’s fate turns nearly laughable. He positions himself observing broken milk pots and strands of fur in hay barns like a combined the Belgian detective and Sherlock Holmes – alongside Jussi a rather hapless assistant figure (none of whom were required to lick a blend of blood droplets and saliva from his superior to agree that indeed, it was definitely dried blood at the crime scene), before announcing his newest conclusion and pulling a corpse from a bog.
Clashing Agendas
The local leaders are bent on demonstrating that Hilda met her end by a bear, perhaps to protect the calm, perhaps to shield one of their own. The pastor is bent on proving the opposite, and the proof so quickly stacks up supporting his view that again the drama’s plausibility and the viewer’s patience are tested. At its best, 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 allures and fears offered by science and belief. At its worst, it’s more like a bear-themed police procedural. Nevertheless, it appears to offer the answer to that debated question: “Females, choose the animal.”
The series is on Disney+ currently.
