A intense discussion recently spread widely across online platforms, following someone posed a query to women: which would you prefer be lost in a forest with a man or with a bear? Like all the best hypothetical scenarios, it revealed vastly opposing perspectives and experiences, illuminated divides among genders, and could easily cause a deep personal dilemma if you thought on it extensively. Additionally, there came the predictable coda in which some males took to the internet to inform women how stupid they had been for choosing the bear and proceeded to limn the consequences they deserved for it. This at minimum enabled the women 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. This six-episode drama is based from Scandinavian writer Mikael Niemi’s 2018 book of the same name (translated two years later for English readers). It traces the struggles of a pastor (the lead actor) and his family as they come to begin a fresh religious post in Kengis, a remote settlement in northern Sweden, during the mid-19th century. In a place lacking many joys, not one of the locals particularly appreciate his strict approach to drinking and revelry, but it is his defense of impoverished people – especially the indigenous Sami, from which hails the pastor’s foster child the youth Jussi (the young actor) – and his conviction in social justice and equal rights that places him on a collision course with the Kengis powers that be.
The Opposing Forces
Quickly in cahoots against him are the lawman Brahe (the performer), the intimidating mill owner the matron Sjödahl (the actress), seen initially dismissing a newly injured laborer with a month’s pay while he is still babbling upon seeing his crushed hand, and anyone else who profit from a community easily swayed for a few bottles of liquor provided by the unsettling shopkeeper the merchant Lindmark (the actor). Although, in fairness, Lindmark’s creepiness diminishes once itinerant painter Beronius appears on the scene (Simon J Berger, delivering a performance of exceptional unsettling intensity). If they are – like the pastor himself – just slightly beyond than caricatures, they still serve as effective ones.
Narrative Development
Once the foundations of tension planted, the moment arrives to proceed to narrative business. The servant employed by the doctor, Hilda (the actress), accordingly vanishes from the woods. Signs of her escape and animal scratches upon a trunk are found yet she remains completely absent. Rumours and anxieties regarding a human-devouring bear roaming the woods spread, but the pastor holds a different view that he and Jussi set out to prove.
A Strange Creation
This Bear Drama is a slightly odd beast. It creates a fine sense of the desolation that allows suspicion and prejudice and grim legends flourish from the native legend that bears can be controlled or possessed by the spirits of humans. It avoids romanticise the hardscrabble life experienced by the villagers, in which brutality, whether that of nature or people, lurks constantly at the periphery, waiting to erupt. But the characters seldom evolve more than ciphers – or maybe, as the struggles amid fairness and revenge, logic and religion, good and evil escalate, emblematic figures in a fable – preventing the whole thing fully becoming immersive.
Stylistic Shifts
Additionally, there are the many tonally jarring instances in which the pastor’s ability in finding evidence and discern the maid’s destiny turns nearly laughable. He positions himself looking at shattered containers and strands of fur in hay barns like a combined the Belgian detective and Sherlock Holmes – with Jussi a rather hapless assistant figure (none of whom were required to lick a mixture of blood droplets and saliva from his superior to agree that indeed, it was clearly coagulated blood on the site), prior to declaring his newest conclusion and extracting a body from a bog.
Clashing Agendas
The local leaders are determined proving that Hilda was killed by an animal, perhaps to preserve the peace, or possibly to protect one of their own. The clergyman is intent on proving otherwise, and the evidence so quickly stacks up supporting his view that once more the drama’s plausibility and the viewer’s patience get strained. At its best, the series evokes memories of the TV version a few years ago of Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, through its portrayal of the opposing allures and fears presented by rational thought and belief. In its low points, it’s more like Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Still, it appears to provide the response to that debated question: “Ladies, take the bear.”
The series is on Disney+ currently.
