A heated discussion recently went viral on social media, after someone asked a query to women: which would you prefer find yourself stranded in a forest with a man or a bear? Similar to the most engaging thought experiments, it exposed vastly opposing worldviews and life encounters, 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 in which some males came online to inform women how stupid they had been for choosing the animal and went on to limn the punishments they deserved for it. This at minimum allowed those females who had been hesitating over their choice to make it with a new confidence.
Dramatising the Setup
The Bear-Cooking Tale effectively brings to life this nifty small premise. This six-episode drama is based on Scandinavian writer the novelist’s 2018 book of the same name (rendered two years later for English readers). It follows the struggles of a pastor (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his family when they arrive to begin a fresh religious post in Kengis, an isolated settlement in northern Sweden, during the mid-19th century. In a place with few pleasures, none of the locals especially warm to his puritanical stance on alcohol and revelry, yet it is his protection of impoverished people – especially the indigenous Sami, from among whom comes the preacher’s adopted son Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in social justice and equal rights that places him in direct opposition against the Kengis local authorities.
The Opposing Forces
Soon in cahoots against him are the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the fearsome factory proprietor Madam Sjödahl (the actress), seen early on dismissing a recently mangled worker with a month’s pay while he is still babbling at the sight of his pulped hand, and anyone else who benefit from a populace who can be bought with some containers of the whisky provided by the unsettling shopkeeper Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). However, in fairness, Lindmark’s eeriness pales once itinerant painter the artist Beronius arrives in the story (Simon J Berger, delivering a performance of exceptional unsettling intensity). While they remain – like the pastor himself – just slightly beyond than caricatures, they still serve as potent archetypes.
Narrative Development
With the seeds of conflict sown, the moment arrives to get down with the storyline. The maid from the doctor’s house, Hilda (the actress), accordingly vanishes in the forest. Signs of her flight and animal scratches upon a trunk are found yet she remains completely absent. Gossip and anxieties of a man/maid-eating bear roaming the woodland circulate, but the pastor has another theory that he and Jussi set out to verify.
A Strange Creation
This Bear Drama is a somewhat peculiar show. It creates a fine sense of the desolation that lets distrust and prejudice and dark myths flourish from the native legend that animals might be dominated or inhabited by the spirits of humans. And it doesn’t romanticise the hardscrabble life led by the villagers, where brutality, whether that of the wild or people, always looms at the periphery, waiting to erupt. Yet the personas seldom evolve more than ciphers – or perhaps, as the struggles between justice and revenge, logic and religion, good and evil escalate, emblematic figures in a fable – preventing the entire production fully becoming immersive.
Tonal Inconsistencies
And then, exist the many tonally jarring moments in which the clergyman’s skill to discover clues and determine Hilda’s fate turns almost risible. He positions himself observing shattered containers and strands of fur within storage sheds as a fusion of Hercule Poirot and Sherlock Holmes – with Jussi a particularly unfortunate assistant figure (neither of whom had to taste a blend 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 village elite are bent on demonstrating that the maid met her end by an animal, perhaps to preserve the calm, or possibly to protect a fellow elite. The clergyman is bent on establishing otherwise, and the proof so rapidly stacks up supporting his view that once more the drama’s plausibility and the viewer’s patience are tested. At its best, the series evokes memories of the adaptation a few years ago of Sarah Perry’s the serpent tale, with its evocation of the competing attractions and terrors presented by science and belief. At its worst, it resembles Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Nevertheless, it does seem to provide the response to that debated question: “Ladies, take the bear.”
The series streams on Disney+ currently.
