An intense debate lately spread widely on social media, following someone posed a query for females: would you rather find yourself stranded in the woods with a man or a bear? Like all the best thought experiments, it exposed wildly different perspectives and life encounters, highlighted divides between the sexes, and could easily cause a deep personal dilemma if you thought about it for too long. There was also the predictable follow-up where men of a certain stripe took to the internet to inform females how stupid they were to select the animal and went on to describe the consequences they deserved for that choice. This at minimum allowed those females who had been hesitating over their choice to make it with a new confidence.
Portraying the Setup
The Bear-Cooking Tale skillfully dramatises this nifty small premise. This six-episode drama is based on Swedish author Mikael Niemi’s 2018 book of the same name (translated two years later for an English audience). It traces the tribulations of a pastor (the lead actor) and his household when they arrive to begin a new ministry in Kengis, a remote village in northern Sweden, in 1852. Within a community with few pleasures, not one of the locals particularly warm to his puritanical approach to alcohol and dancing, yet it is his protection of the poor – particularly the indigenous Sami, from which comes the preacher’s foster child the youth Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in societal fairness and equality that sets him in direct opposition against the Kengis powers that be.
The Opposing Forces
Soon in cahoots opposing him are the sheriff the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the fearsome factory proprietor the matron Sjödahl (Pernilla August), seen initially firing a newly injured worker with a month’s pay as he remains gibbering upon seeing of his pulped hand, and all others who benefit from a populace easily swayed for a few bottles of liquor sold by the creepy store owner Lindmark (the actor). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s eeriness diminishes when itinerant painter the artist Beronius appears in the story (Simon J Berger, providing an acting turn of rare unsettling intensity). While they remain – like the pastor himself – only a little more than caricatures, they still serve as potent archetypes.
Plot Progression
Once the foundations of tension sown, the moment arrives to get down with the storyline. The maid from the doctor’s house, Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), duly vanishes from the woods. Signs of her escape and bear markings upon a trunk get discovered but she is completely absent. Gossip and fears regarding a human-devouring bear prowling the woodland circulate, but the pastor holds a different view which he and his ward set out to verify.
An Odd Beast
This Bear Drama is a slightly odd beast. It creates a strong impression of the bleakness that allows distrust and bias and grim legends flourish based on local folklore that animals might be dominated or possessed by the souls of humans. It avoids idealising the hardscrabble life led by the residents, where violence, whether that of nature or mankind, lurks constantly on the edges, waiting to erupt. But the characters seldom evolve more than ciphers – or maybe, while the conflicts amid fairness and revenge, rationality and faith, good and evil escalate, representative characters within a moral tale – preventing the whole thing truly becoming immersive.
Stylistic Shifts
And then, exist the many stylistically clashing moments where the clergyman’s skill to discover clues and determine Hilda’s fate turns nearly laughable. He stands 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 Hastings-cum-Watson (none of whom were required to lick a mixture of blood droplets and saliva from his superior to confirm that, yes, it was clearly coagulated blood on the site), prior to declaring his newest conclusion and pulling a body out of a swamp.
Opposing Goals
The village elite are bent on proving that the maid met her end by an animal, perhaps to preserve the peace, perhaps to shield a fellow elite. The clergyman is bent on establishing the opposite, and the proof so quickly accumulates in his favour that again the drama’s plausibility and the viewer’s patience get strained. In its finest moments, the series evokes memories of the TV version some years back of Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the opposing attractions and terrors presented by rational thought and belief. In its low points, it resembles a bear-themed police procedural. Still, it does seem to offer the answer to the earlier query: “Females, choose the animal.”
The series streams on Disney+ now.
