A intense debate lately spread widely on social media, after a user asked a query for females: would you rather find yourself stranded in the woods with a man or a bear? Like all the most engaging hypothetical scenarios, it revealed wildly different worldviews and experiences, illuminated chasms between the sexes, and was likely to induce an existential crisis if you thought about it extensively. There was also the almost inevitable coda where some males came online to inform women how foolish they had been for choosing the bear and proceeded to describe the punishments they deserved for it. This at least enabled the women who had been hesitating about their decision to decide with renewed assurance.
Dramatising the Setup
The Bear-Cooking Tale effectively dramatises this nifty little setup. This six-episode series is adapted on Swedish author Mikael Niemi’s 2018 novel with the identical title (rendered two years later for an English audience). It follows the tribulations of a pastor (the lead actor) and his family as they come to start a new ministry in Kengis, an isolated village in northern Sweden, during the mid-19th century. In a place with few pleasures, none of the inhabitants particularly warm to his puritanical 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 adopted son the youth Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in societal fairness and equality that places him on a collision course against the Kengis powers that be.
The Antagonists
Soon in cahoots against him include the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the intimidating factory proprietor Madam Sjödahl (the actress), seen initially firing a recently mangled laborer with minimal compensation while he is still babbling upon seeing of his pulped hand, and all others who profit from a community easily swayed for a few bottles of liquor provided by the creepy shopkeeper the merchant Lindmark (the actor). Although, to be fair, Lindmark’s eeriness diminishes when travelling artist the artist Beronius arrives on the scene (the performer, delivering a performance of exceptional discomfiting power). If they are – like the pastor himself – just slightly beyond than caricatures, they still serve as effective ones.
Plot Progression
Once the foundations of tension sown, it is time to get down with the storyline. The maid employed by the doctor, Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), duly goes missing from the woods. Signs of her escape and bear markings on a tree get discovered but she is nowhere to be seen. Rumours and fears regarding a human-devouring beast roaming the woodland spread, yet the clergyman has another theory that he and Jussi embark to prove.
A Strange Creation
This Bear Drama is a somewhat peculiar show. It creates a fine sense of the bleakness that allows distrust and prejudice and dark myths flourish from the native legend that bears might be dominated or inhabited by the souls of men. It avoids romanticise the tough existence led by the villagers, in which violence, be it from nature or mankind, always looms at the periphery, poised to explode. Yet the personas rarely become beyond symbols – or perhaps, as the struggles between justice and revenge, rationality and faith, virtue and evil escalate, emblematic figures within a moral tale – which stops the entire production truly becoming immersive.
Stylistic Shifts
Additionally, exist numerous stylistically clashing instances in which the pastor’s ability to discover clues and discern Hilda’s fate becomes almost risible. He positions himself looking at shattered containers and clumps of hair within storage sheds like a combined Hercule Poirot the English sleuth – alongside Jussi a particularly unfortunate assistant figure (none of whom had to taste a mixture of blood droplets and the boss’s spit to confirm that, yes, it was clearly dried blood at the crime scene), before announcing his latest deduction and extracting a body from a bog.
Opposing Goals
The village elite are bent on proving that Hilda was killed by an animal, perhaps to preserve the peace, or possibly to protect one of their own. The clergyman is intent on establishing otherwise, and the evidence so quickly accumulates in his favour that again the drama’s plausibility and the viewer’s patience are tested. At its best, the series evokes memories of the adaptation some years back of Sarah Perry’s the serpent tale, through its portrayal of the competing allures and fears presented by science and belief. In its low points, it resembles a bear-themed police procedural. Nevertheless, it does seem to provide the response to the earlier query: “Ladies, take the bear.”
The series streams on Disney+ currently.
