An heated debate recently went viral on social media, after a user posed the question for females: which would you prefer be lost in a forest alongside a male or a bear? Like all the best thought experiments, it exposed wildly different worldviews and life encounters, highlighted divides among genders, and could easily cause a deep personal dilemma if you thought about it for too long. Additionally, there came the almost inevitable follow-up where some males took to the internet to inform females how foolish they had been to select the animal and proceeded to limn the consequences they deserved for it. This at least allowed the women who were uncertain over their choice to decide with a new confidence.
Dramatising the Setup
The Bear-Cooking Tale skillfully brings to life this nifty little setup. The six-part drama is adapted on Swedish author Mikael Niemi’s 2018 novel with the identical title (translated in 2020 for English readers). It follows the tribulations of a pastor (the lead actor) and his family when they arrive to start a new ministry in Kengis, a remote 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 defense of impoverished people – particularly the indigenous Sami, from among whom comes the pastor’s foster child Jussi (the young actor) – and his belief in social justice and equality that places him in direct opposition against the Kengis local authorities.
The Opposing Forces
Soon collaborating opposing him are the lawman Brahe (the performer), the fearsome factory proprietor Madam Sjödahl (Pernilla August), seen early on dismissing a newly injured laborer with minimal compensation as he remains babbling upon seeing his crushed hand, and anyone else who profit from a populace who can be bought for a few bottles of the whisky sold by the unsettling store owner Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). However, in fairness, Lindmark’s eeriness diminishes once itinerant painter Beronius appears in the story (Simon J Berger, providing a performance of rare discomfiting power). If they are – similar to the clergyman – only a little more being stereotypes, they still serve as effective ones.
Plot Progression
With the seeds of conflict planted, it is time to get down with the storyline. The maid employed by the doctor, the character Hilda (the actress), duly vanishes from the woods. Indications of her escape and animal scratches upon a trunk are found yet she remains nowhere to be seen. Rumours and anxieties regarding a human-devouring bear roaming the woods circulate, yet the clergyman holds a different view that he and Jussi embark to verify.
An Odd Beast
This Bear Drama is a slightly odd beast. It creates a fine sense of the desolation that lets suspicion and bias and grim legends thrive from the native legend that animals can be controlled or possessed by the spirits of humans. It avoids romanticise the tough existence experienced by the residents, in which violence, be it from nature or people, always looms on the edges, poised to explode. But the characters seldom evolve beyond symbols – or perhaps, as the struggles between justice and vengeance, rationality and faith, good and wickedness escalate, emblematic figures within a moral tale – which stops the whole thing truly coming to life.
Tonal Inconsistencies
And then, there are numerous tonally jarring instances where the pastor’s ability to discover clues and discern the maid’s destiny turns nearly laughable. He stands looking at broken milk pots and clumps of hair within storage sheds like a combined the Belgian detective the English sleuth – alongside Jussi a rather hapless Hastings-cum-Watson (neither of whom were required to taste a mixture of blood droplets and the boss’s spit to confirm that indeed, it was clearly coagulated blood on the site), prior to declaring his newest conclusion and pulling a body out of a swamp.
Clashing Agendas
The local leaders are bent on demonstrating that the maid met her end by a bear, maybe to preserve the peace, perhaps to protect one of their own. The clergyman is bent on establishing the opposite, and the proof so rapidly accumulates in his favour that once more the drama’s plausibility and audience tolerance are tested. In its finest moments, the series is reminiscent of the TV version some years back of Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the competing allures and terrors presented by rational thought and religion. At its worst, it resembles Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Nevertheless, it appears to offer the response to that debated question: “Ladies, take the bear.”
The series is on Disney+ currently.
