An heated debate lately went viral across online platforms, after a user asked a query to women: would you rather be lost in the woods alongside a male or a bear? Similar to the most engaging hypothetical scenarios, it revealed vastly opposing worldviews and experiences, highlighted chasms between the sexes, and could easily to induce a deep personal dilemma for anyone pondering on it extensively. Additionally, there came the almost inevitable follow-up where men of a certain stripe came online to tell women how foolish they had been for choosing the bear and went on to limn the consequences they deserved for it. This at minimum enabled those females who had been hesitating about their decision to decide with renewed assurance.
Dramatising the Setup
The Bear-Cooking Tale skillfully dramatises this clever small premise. This six-episode series is adapted from Swedish author the novelist’s 2018 book with the identical title (translated two years later for an English audience). It follows the struggles of a clergyman (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his family when they arrive to start a fresh religious post in Kengis, an isolated village in Sweden’s north, in 1852. Within a community with few pleasures, none of the locals especially warm to his strict approach to drinking and revelry, but it is his protection of the poor – particularly the native Sami population, from which comes the preacher’s foster child Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his conviction in societal fairness and equality that places him on a collision course with the Kengis powers that be.
The Opposing Forces
Quickly collaborating against him are the lawman Brahe (the performer), the intimidating factory proprietor Madam Sjödahl (the actress), seen initially firing a newly injured laborer with minimal compensation as he remains babbling at the sight of his pulped hand, and all others who benefit from a populace easily swayed with some containers of the whisky provided by the unsettling store owner Lindmark (the actor). Although, in fairness, Lindmark’s creepiness diminishes once travelling artist Beronius appears on the scene (Simon J Berger, providing an acting turn of exceptional unsettling intensity). If they are – like the pastor himself – only a little more than caricatures, they still serve as effective ones.
Plot Progression
With the seeds of conflict sown, the moment arrives to get down with the storyline. The maid from the doctor’s house, the character Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), accordingly vanishes from the woods. Indications of her flight and bear markings on a tree get discovered yet she remains nowhere to be seen. Gossip and anxieties of a man/maid-eating bear roaming the woodland spread, yet the clergyman has another theory which he and his ward embark to prove.
A Strange Creation
This Bear Drama is a somewhat peculiar show. It creates a strong impression of the desolation that allows distrust and prejudice and grim legends flourish based on local folklore that animals might be dominated or possessed by the spirits of humans. It avoids idealising the tough existence led by the residents, in which violence, be it from the wild or people, always looms at the periphery, poised to explode. But the characters seldom evolve more than ciphers – or maybe, while the conflicts between justice and revenge, rationality and religion, virtue and evil intensify, emblematic figures within a moral tale – which stops the entire production fully coming to life.
Tonal Inconsistencies
Additionally, exist the many stylistically clashing instances where the pastor’s ability in finding evidence and discern Hilda’s fate becomes almost risible. He stands observing shattered containers and clumps of hair in hay barns like a combined Hercule Poirot and Sherlock Holmes – with Jussi a particularly unfortunate assistant figure (neither of whom had to taste a mixture of blood spatter and saliva from his superior to agree that indeed, it was definitely dried blood at the crime scene), prior to declaring his latest deduction and pulling a corpse out of a swamp.
Clashing Agendas
The local leaders are bent on demonstrating that the maid was killed by a bear, maybe to protect the peace, or possibly to protect a fellow elite. The clergyman is bent on proving otherwise, and the proof so rapidly accumulates in his favour that once more the drama’s plausibility and the viewer’s patience get strained. At its best, the series is reminiscent of the adaptation some years back of the author’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the opposing allures and terrors offered by rational thought and belief. At its worst, it’s more like a bear-themed police procedural. Still, it does seem to provide the response to that debated question: “Ladies, take the bear.”
The series streams on Disney+ currently.
