A heated debate recently spread widely across online platforms, following a user asked the question to women: which would you prefer be lost in a forest alongside a male or a bear? Like all the best thought experiments, it exposed vastly opposing perspectives and experiences, highlighted divides between the sexes, and could easily cause a deep personal dilemma for anyone pondering about it extensively. There was also the predictable coda where some males came online to tell females how foolish they had been for choosing the animal and proceeded to describe the punishments they deserved for it. This at least enabled the women who were uncertain over their choice to decide with renewed assurance.
Dramatising the Scenario
The Bear-Cooking Tale skillfully dramatises this nifty little setup. The six-part series is adapted on Scandinavian writer Mikael Niemi’s 2018 novel with the identical title (translated in 2020 for English readers). It traces the tribulations of a pastor (the lead actor) and his family when they arrive to start a new ministry within Kengis, an isolated village in Sweden’s north, during the mid-19th century. In a place with few pleasures, none of the inhabitants especially appreciate his strict approach to alcohol and dancing, yet it is his defense of impoverished people – particularly the indigenous Sami, from which hails the preacher’s adopted son Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in societal fairness and equality that sets him on a collision course with the Kengis powers that be.
The Antagonists
Soon in cahoots opposing him are the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the fearsome factory proprietor Madam Sjödahl (the actress), seen early on dismissing a newly injured worker with minimal compensation as he remains gibbering upon seeing his crushed hand, and anyone else who benefit from a community who can be bought for a few bottles of the whisky sold by the creepy shopkeeper the merchant Lindmark (the actor). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s eeriness pales once itinerant painter the artist Beronius arrives on the scene (the performer, providing an acting turn of rare unsettling intensity). If they are – similar to the clergyman – only a little more than caricatures, they still serve as potent archetypes.
Plot Progression
Once the foundations of tension sown, it is time to proceed to narrative business. The servant from the doctor’s house, the character Hilda (the actress), accordingly vanishes from the woods. Indications of her flight and bear markings on a tree are found yet she remains completely absent. Gossip and anxieties regarding a human-devouring beast roaming the woods spread, yet the clergyman has another theory that he and Jussi set out to prove.
An Odd Beast
This Bear Drama is a slightly odd beast. It creates a strong impression of the desolation that lets suspicion and bias and dark myths thrive from the native legend that animals can be controlled or inhabited by the souls of men. It avoids romanticise the hardscrabble life led by the villagers, in which brutality, be it from the wild or mankind, lurks constantly at the periphery, poised to explode. Yet the personas seldom evolve beyond symbols – or perhaps, as the struggles amid fairness and vengeance, rationality and faith, good and wickedness escalate, representative characters within a moral tale – preventing the entire production fully coming to life.
Stylistic Shifts
And then, there are the many stylistically clashing moments in which the clergyman’s skill in finding evidence and determine the maid’s destiny turns almost risible. He positions himself looking at broken milk pots and strands of fur in hay barns as a fusion of Hercule Poirot the English sleuth – with Jussi a rather hapless assistant figure (neither of whom had to lick a blend of blood droplets and saliva from his superior to confirm that indeed, it was clearly coagulated blood on the site), prior to declaring his latest deduction and pulling a body out of a swamp.
Clashing Agendas
The village elite are bent on demonstrating that Hilda was killed by a bear, maybe to preserve the calm, perhaps to protect one of their own. The pastor is bent on establishing otherwise, and the proof so rapidly accumulates in his favour that again the show’s credibility and the viewer’s patience get strained. In its finest moments, the series evokes memories of the TV version a few years ago of the author’s the serpent tale, with its evocation of the competing allures and terrors presented by rational thought and belief. At its worst, it resembles Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Still, it does seem to provide the response to the earlier query: “Females, choose the animal.”
The series streams on Disney+ currently.
