A heated debate recently spread widely on social media, after someone asked the question for females: which would you prefer find yourself stranded in a forest with a man or a bear? Like all the most engaging thought experiments, it exposed vastly opposing perspectives and experiences, illuminated divides among genders, and was likely to induce a deep personal dilemma for anyone pondering on it for too long. Additionally, there came the predictable coda where men of a certain stripe took to the internet to tell females how foolish they had been to select the bear and went on to limn the punishments they deserved for it. This at least enabled the women who had been hesitating over their choice to make it with renewed assurance.
Portraying the Scenario
The Bear-Cooking Tale effectively dramatises this clever small premise. The six-part series is based on Swedish author Mikael Niemi’s 2018 novel with the identical title (translated in 2020 for English readers). It traces the struggles of a pastor (the lead actor) and his household as they come to start a fresh religious post within Kengis, an isolated settlement in northern Sweden, in 1852. Within a community with few pleasures, none of the inhabitants especially warm to his strict stance on drinking and dancing, but it is his defense of impoverished people – particularly the native Sami population, from among whom hails the preacher’s foster child Jussi (the young actor) – and his conviction in societal fairness and equal rights that places him on a collision course against the Kengis powers that be.
The Opposing Forces
Soon in cahoots opposing him include the lawman the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the fearsome mill owner Madam Sjödahl (the actress), observed early on firing a newly injured worker with a month’s pay as he remains gibbering upon seeing his crushed hand, and all others who benefit from a populace easily swayed with some containers of liquor sold by the unsettling shopkeeper Lindmark (the actor). Although, to be fair, Lindmark’s creepiness diminishes once itinerant painter the artist Beronius appears on the scene (the performer, delivering a performance of rare discomfiting power). While they remain – like the pastor himself – only a little more being stereotypes, they are at least potent archetypes.
Narrative Development
Once the foundations of conflict planted, it is time to proceed with the storyline. The maid employed by the doctor, the character Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), accordingly goes missing from the woods. Indications of her flight and animal scratches upon a trunk are found yet she remains completely absent. Rumours and anxieties of a man/maid-eating bear roaming the woodland spread, but the pastor has another theory which he and his ward embark to prove.
An Odd Beast
This Bear Drama is a somewhat odd beast. It creates a strong impression of the desolation that lets distrust and prejudice and grim legends thrive based on local folklore that bears can be controlled or possessed by the spirits of humans. And it doesn’t idealising the hardscrabble life experienced by the villagers, where violence, whether that of nature or people, lurks constantly on the edges, poised to explode. Yet the personas rarely become beyond symbols – or maybe, as the struggles amid fairness and vengeance, rationality and faith, good and wickedness escalate, emblematic figures in a fable – preventing the entire production truly coming to life.
Stylistic Shifts
And then, exist the many tonally jarring instances where the pastor’s ability in finding evidence and discern Hilda’s fate becomes almost risible. He stands observing shattered containers and strands of fur within storage sheds as a fusion of Hercule Poirot the English sleuth – alongside Jussi a rather hapless Hastings-cum-Watson (neither of whom had to taste a mixture of blood spatter and saliva from his superior to agree that, yes, it was clearly coagulated blood at the crime scene), prior to declaring his latest deduction and pulling a body out of a swamp.
Opposing Goals
The local leaders are determined proving that the maid was killed by an animal, perhaps to preserve the calm, perhaps to protect a fellow elite. The clergyman is intent on establishing the opposite, and the evidence so quickly stacks up supporting his view that once more the drama’s plausibility and the viewer’s patience get strained. At its best, the series evokes memories of the adaptation some years back of the author’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the competing attractions and terrors offered by rational thought and belief. At its worst, it resembles a bear-themed police procedural. Nevertheless, it does seem to offer the answer to the earlier query: “Females, choose the animal.”
The series is on Disney+ now.
