An intense debate recently spread widely on social media, after someone posed the question for females: which would you prefer be lost in the woods with a man or a bear? Like all the most engaging thought experiments, it exposed vastly opposing worldviews and life encounters, highlighted divides among genders, and was likely to induce a deep personal dilemma if you thought about it extensively. There was also the predictable follow-up where some males took to the internet to tell females how foolish they were to select the animal and went on to limn the punishments they deserved for it. This at least allowed those females who had been hesitating over their choice to make it with renewed assurance.
Dramatising the Setup
The Bear-Cooking Tale skillfully brings to life this clever little setup. The six-part drama is adapted from Swedish author the novelist’s 2018 novel of the same name (rendered two years later for English readers). It traces the struggles of a pastor (the lead actor) and his household as they come to start a new ministry in Kengis, a remote settlement in northern Sweden, during the mid-19th century. In a place with few pleasures, not one of the inhabitants particularly appreciate his puritanical approach to drinking and dancing, but it is his defense of impoverished people – particularly the native Sami population, from among whom comes the pastor’s adopted son Jussi (the young actor) – and his conviction in societal fairness and equal rights that sets him on a collision course against the Kengis local authorities.
The Antagonists
Quickly collaborating opposing him are the lawman Brahe (the performer), the fearsome factory proprietor Madam Sjödahl (the actress), seen early on firing a newly injured laborer with minimal compensation as he remains babbling at the sight his crushed hand, and all others who profit from a community easily swayed with some containers of liquor provided by the unsettling shopkeeper the merchant Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s creepiness pales when travelling artist the artist Beronius arrives in the story (Simon J Berger, providing an acting turn of exceptional unsettling intensity). If they are – similar to the clergyman – only a little more being stereotypes, they still serve as potent archetypes.
Plot Progression
Once the foundations of tension planted, the moment arrives to proceed with the storyline. The servant employed by the doctor, Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), accordingly vanishes from the woods. Signs of her escape and bear markings upon a trunk get discovered yet she remains nowhere to be seen. Rumours and anxieties of a man/maid-eating bear prowling the woodland spread, but the pastor has another theory that he and Jussi set out to prove.
A Strange Creation
This Bear Drama is a slightly odd beast. It conjures a fine sense of the bleakness that lets distrust and bias and dark myths flourish from the native legend that animals can be controlled or inhabited by the souls of humans. It avoids idealising the hardscrabble life experienced by the villagers, in which violence, whether that of the wild or people, lurks constantly at the periphery, waiting to erupt. Yet the personas rarely become more than ciphers – or perhaps, while the conflicts between justice and revenge, logic and faith, good and wickedness intensify, emblematic figures within a moral tale – which stops the whole thing fully becoming immersive.
Tonal Inconsistencies
Additionally, exist the many stylistically clashing instances where the pastor’s ability to discover clues and determine the maid’s destiny becomes almost risible. He positions himself looking at shattered containers and clumps of hair within storage sheds as a fusion of the Belgian detective the English sleuth – alongside Jussi a particularly unfortunate Hastings-cum-Watson (none of whom were required to taste a mixture of blood spatter and saliva from his superior to confirm that indeed, it was definitely coagulated blood at the crime scene), before announcing his latest deduction and extracting a corpse out of a swamp.
Opposing Goals
The village elite are bent on demonstrating that the maid was killed by a bear, perhaps to protect the calm, or possibly to shield one of their own. The clergyman is intent on establishing otherwise, and the evidence so rapidly stacks up in his favour that again the show’s credibility and audience tolerance are tested. In its finest moments, the series is reminiscent of the TV version a few years ago of Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, through its portrayal of the opposing attractions and fears presented by science and religion. At its worst, it resembles a bear-themed police procedural. Nevertheless, it does seem to offer the answer to that debated question: “Ladies, take the bear.”
The series is on Disney+ currently.
