An intense discussion recently went viral across online platforms, following someone asked the question to women: which would you prefer find yourself stranded in the woods alongside a male or a bear? Similar to the most engaging thought experiments, it revealed wildly different worldviews and experiences, illuminated divides between the sexes, and was likely to induce a deep personal dilemma if you thought on it extensively. Additionally, there came the predictable coda in which men of a certain stripe came online to tell women how stupid they were to select the bear and proceeded to limn the punishments they deserved for it. This at least enabled the women who had been hesitating about their decision to make it with a new confidence.
Dramatising the Scenario
The Bear-Cooking Tale skillfully dramatises this nifty little setup. This six-episode series is adapted from Swedish author the novelist’s 2018 novel with the identical title (translated two years later for an English audience). It traces the tribulations of a pastor (the lead actor) and his family when they arrive to start a new ministry in Kengis, an isolated village in Sweden’s north, in 1852. In a place with few pleasures, not one of the locals especially warm to his puritanical stance on drinking and dancing, but it is his defense of impoverished people – especially the indigenous Sami, from which hails 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 powers that be.
The Antagonists
Soon collaborating against him are the lawman Brahe (the performer), the fearsome factory proprietor Madam Sjödahl (Pernilla August), seen early on dismissing a recently mangled laborer with a month’s pay while he is still gibbering upon seeing of his pulped hand, and anyone else who benefit from a community who can be bought for a few bottles of liquor sold by the unsettling shopkeeper the merchant Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s creepiness pales once itinerant painter Beronius appears in the story (Simon J Berger, providing a performance of rare discomfiting power). While they remain – like the pastor himself – just slightly beyond than caricatures, they still serve as potent archetypes.
Plot Progression
With the seeds of conflict planted, it is time to proceed with the storyline. The servant employed by the doctor, Hilda (the actress), accordingly goes missing in the forest. Signs of her escape and animal scratches upon a trunk are found yet she remains completely absent. Rumours and fears of a man/maid-eating bear prowling the woodland spread, but the pastor has another theory which he and his ward set out to prove.
A Strange Creation
This Bear Drama is a slightly odd beast. It creates a strong impression of the bleakness that lets suspicion and bias and dark myths flourish from the native legend that animals might be dominated or inhabited by the souls of men. It avoids idealising the tough existence experienced by the villagers, in which brutality, whether that of nature or mankind, always looms on the edges, waiting to erupt. But the characters rarely become more than ciphers – or maybe, while the conflicts amid fairness and revenge, rationality and religion, good and wickedness intensify, representative characters within a moral tale – which stops the whole thing fully becoming immersive.
Tonal Inconsistencies
Additionally, exist the many stylistically clashing moments where the pastor’s ability to discover clues and discern the maid’s destiny turns nearly laughable. He positions himself looking at shattered containers and clumps of hair in hay barns as a fusion of Hercule Poirot and Sherlock Holmes – alongside Jussi a rather hapless Hastings-cum-Watson (none of whom had to lick a mixture of blood spatter and the boss’s spit to confirm that, yes, it was definitely coagulated blood on the site), prior to declaring his latest deduction and extracting a body out of a swamp.
Opposing Goals
The local leaders are determined proving that the maid was killed by an animal, perhaps to protect the peace, perhaps to protect a fellow elite. The pastor is intent on establishing the opposite, and the proof so quickly stacks up supporting his view that once more the show’s credibility and the viewer’s patience are tested. In its finest moments, the series evokes memories of the TV version some years back of the author’s the serpent tale, with its evocation of the opposing allures and fears presented by science and religion. At its worst, it’s more like 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+ now.
