A intense debate lately spread widely across online platforms, after a user posed a query to women: which would you prefer be lost in a forest alongside a male or with a bear? Like all the most engaging hypothetical scenarios, it revealed vastly opposing perspectives and life encounters, illuminated divides between the sexes, and was likely to induce an existential crisis for anyone pondering about it for too long. Additionally, there came the almost inevitable coda where some males came online to tell females how stupid they had been for choosing the bear and proceeded to limn the consequences they merited for that choice. This at minimum enabled the women who had been hesitating over their choice to decide with a new confidence.
Portraying the Scenario
The Bear-Cooking Tale effectively dramatises this nifty little setup. This six-episode drama is based on Swedish author the novelist’s 2018 book of the same name (rendered two years later for English readers). It traces the tribulations of a clergyman (the lead actor) and his family when they arrive to start a fresh religious post in Kengis, an isolated village in Sweden’s north, during the mid-19th century. Within a community lacking many joys, none of the inhabitants particularly warm to his puritanical stance on alcohol and revelry, yet it is his protection of impoverished people – especially the indigenous Sami, from which hails the pastor’s adopted son the youth Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in social justice and equal rights that places him in direct opposition with the Kengis powers that be.
The Opposing Forces
Quickly collaborating against him include the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the intimidating mill owner the matron Sjödahl (Pernilla August), seen initially dismissing a newly injured laborer with minimal compensation while he is still gibbering at the sight his crushed hand, and all others who profit from a community who can be bought for a few bottles of the whisky sold by the creepy store owner the merchant Lindmark (the actor). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s creepiness pales when itinerant painter Beronius appears in the story (Simon J Berger, providing a performance of exceptional discomfiting power). If they are – similar to the clergyman – just slightly beyond being stereotypes, they are at least potent archetypes.
Narrative Development
Once the foundations of conflict sown, it is time to get down to narrative business. The maid from the doctor’s house, Hilda (the actress), duly vanishes in the forest. Signs of her flight and bear markings upon a trunk get discovered but she is completely absent. Gossip and fears regarding a human-devouring bear prowling the woods circulate, yet the clergyman holds a different view that he and Jussi set out to verify.
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 grim legends thrive from the native legend that animals can be controlled or possessed by the spirits of humans. And it doesn’t idealising the hardscrabble life led by the villagers, in which violence, whether that of the wild or people, always looms on the edges, poised to explode. Yet the personas seldom evolve more than ciphers – or perhaps, while the conflicts between justice and vengeance, rationality and religion, virtue and wickedness escalate, representative characters within a moral tale – which stops the entire production truly coming to life.
Stylistic Shifts
And then, exist the many tonally jarring moments where the pastor’s ability to discover clues and discern Hilda’s fate turns nearly laughable. He stands observing broken milk pots and clumps of hair within storage sheds as a fusion of the Belgian detective and Sherlock Holmes – alongside Jussi a rather hapless Hastings-cum-Watson (none of whom were required to taste a blend of blood droplets and the boss’s spit to confirm that indeed, it was definitely dried blood on the site), before announcing his latest deduction and extracting a corpse out of a swamp.
Opposing Goals
The local leaders are determined demonstrating that Hilda was killed by an animal, maybe to protect the calm, perhaps to protect one of their own. The pastor is bent on establishing the opposite, and the proof so rapidly accumulates in his favour that once more the show’s credibility and the viewer’s patience are tested. At its best, the series is reminiscent of the adaptation some years back of Sarah Perry’s the serpent tale, through its portrayal of the competing allures and fears offered by science and belief. In its low points, it resembles a bear-themed police procedural. Nevertheless, it appears to provide the response to the earlier query: “Females, choose the animal.”
The series is on Disney+ currently.
