An heated discussion recently went viral on social media, after someone posed a query to women: would you rather be lost in the woods with a man or with a bear? Like all the most engaging thought experiments, it exposed wildly different worldviews and life encounters, highlighted chasms between the sexes, and could easily to induce an existential crisis if you thought on it extensively. There was also the almost inevitable follow-up in which some males took to the internet to tell females how stupid they were to select the bear and went on to limn the consequences they merited for it. This at least enabled the women who were uncertain about their decision to decide with renewed assurance.
Portraying the Setup
The Bear-Cooking Tale effectively dramatises this clever little setup. The six-part series is adapted on Scandinavian writer the novelist’s 2018 book with the identical title (translated in 2020 for English readers). It follows the tribulations of a pastor (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his household as they come to begin a fresh religious post in Kengis, an isolated village in northern Sweden, in 1852. Within a community with few pleasures, none of the locals particularly appreciate his strict stance on drinking and dancing, yet it is his protection of impoverished people – particularly the indigenous Sami, from which hails the pastor’s foster child Jussi (the young actor) – and his conviction in social justice and equality that places him on a collision course against the Kengis powers that be.
The Opposing Forces
Quickly collaborating opposing him are the lawman the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the fearsome mill owner Madam Sjödahl (the actress), seen initially dismissing a newly injured worker with minimal compensation while he is still babbling at the sight of his pulped hand, and anyone else who benefit from a populace who can be bought with some containers of liquor provided by the unsettling store owner the merchant Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s eeriness diminishes when travelling artist the artist Beronius arrives on the scene (the performer, providing an acting turn of rare unsettling intensity). While they remain – similar to the clergyman – only a little more than caricatures, they still serve as potent archetypes.
Narrative Development
With the seeds of conflict sown, it is time to proceed to narrative business. The servant from the doctor’s house, the character Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), duly goes missing in the forest. Indications of her flight and bear markings upon a trunk are found but she is nowhere to be seen. Rumours and anxieties of a man/maid-eating beast roaming the woods spread, but the pastor holds a different view that he and Jussi embark to verify.
A Strange Creation
This Bear Drama is a somewhat peculiar show. It creates a strong impression of the desolation that allows suspicion and prejudice and grim legends thrive based on local folklore that animals can be controlled or inhabited by the spirits of men. And it doesn’t idealising the hardscrabble life led by the villagers, in which brutality, whether that of nature or mankind, lurks constantly at the periphery, waiting to erupt. Yet the personas seldom evolve beyond symbols – or perhaps, while the conflicts between justice and vengeance, logic and faith, virtue and wickedness intensify, representative characters within a moral tale – preventing the whole thing truly becoming immersive.
Stylistic Shifts
Additionally, there are numerous stylistically clashing instances where the pastor’s ability in finding evidence and determine the maid’s destiny becomes almost risible. He stands observing broken milk pots and clumps of hair in hay barns like a combined the Belgian detective and Sherlock Holmes – with Jussi a particularly unfortunate assistant figure (none of whom were required to taste a mixture of blood spatter and saliva from his superior to agree that indeed, it was definitely coagulated blood on the site), before announcing his newest conclusion and pulling a corpse out of a swamp.
Clashing Agendas
The village elite are bent on demonstrating that the maid met her end by a bear, perhaps to protect the peace, or possibly to shield a fellow elite. The clergyman is intent on establishing the opposite, and the proof so rapidly stacks up supporting his view that again the show’s credibility and audience tolerance get strained. At its best, the series is reminiscent of the adaptation a few years ago of the author’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the competing allures and fears offered by rational thought and belief. At its worst, it’s more like a bear-themed police procedural. Nevertheless, it does seem to provide the answer to the earlier query: “Ladies, take the bear.”
The series streams on Disney+ currently.
