A intense debate recently spread widely across online platforms, after someone asked a query for females: would you rather find yourself stranded in the woods alongside a male or with a bear? Similar to the best hypothetical scenarios, it revealed vastly opposing worldviews and life encounters, illuminated divides among genders, and was likely to induce a deep personal dilemma if you thought on it for too long. Additionally, there came the predictable follow-up in which men of a certain stripe took to the internet to tell females how foolish they were for choosing the bear and went on to describe the consequences they deserved for that choice. This at minimum allowed those females who were uncertain about their decision to make it with a new confidence.
Dramatising the Setup
The Bear-Cooking Tale effectively brings to life this nifty little setup. The six-part drama is adapted on Scandinavian writer Mikael Niemi’s 2018 novel of the same name (rendered in 2020 for English readers). It traces the struggles of a clergyman (the lead actor) and his family when they arrive to begin a new ministry in Kengis, an isolated village in Sweden’s north, in 1852. Within a community with few pleasures, not one of the locals especially warm to his strict approach to drinking and revelry, yet it is his defense of the poor – especially the indigenous Sami, from which comes the preacher’s foster child the youth Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in social justice and equality that sets him in direct opposition against the Kengis powers that be.
The Antagonists
Soon collaborating opposing him are the sheriff the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the intimidating mill owner Madam Sjödahl (the actress), observed initially dismissing a recently mangled worker with a month’s pay while he is still gibbering at the sight his crushed hand, and anyone else who profit from a populace who can be bought with some containers of the whisky sold by the creepy shopkeeper the merchant Lindmark (the actor). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s creepiness pales when itinerant painter the artist Beronius appears on the scene (the performer, providing an acting turn of rare unsettling intensity). If they are – similar to the clergyman – just slightly beyond than caricatures, they are at least effective ones.
Narrative Development
With the seeds of tension planted, the moment arrives to get down to narrative business. The servant from the doctor’s house, Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), accordingly goes missing in the forest. 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 prowling the woodland spread, but the pastor has another theory that he and Jussi set out to prove.
A Strange Creation
This Bear Drama is a slightly odd beast. It creates a fine sense of the desolation that allows distrust and prejudice and grim legends flourish based on local folklore that bears can be controlled or possessed by the spirits of humans. And it doesn’t romanticise the tough existence experienced by the residents, where violence, whether that of the wild or people, always looms at the periphery, waiting to erupt. Yet the personas rarely become beyond symbols – or perhaps, as the struggles amid fairness and vengeance, rationality and religion, good and evil escalate, emblematic figures within a moral tale – which stops the entire production truly becoming immersive.
Stylistic Shifts
And then, there are numerous tonally jarring instances where the pastor’s ability to discover clues and discern the maid’s destiny becomes almost risible. He positions himself looking at broken milk pots and clumps of hair within storage sheds as a fusion of the Belgian detective and Sherlock Holmes – with Jussi a particularly unfortunate assistant figure (neither of whom were required to lick a blend of blood droplets and the boss’s spit to confirm that, yes, it was definitely dried blood at the crime scene), before announcing his latest deduction and extracting a corpse from a bog.
Clashing Agendas
The local leaders are determined proving that the maid was killed by a bear, maybe to preserve the calm, perhaps to protect one of their own. The pastor is intent on proving the opposite, and the proof so quickly accumulates in his favour that once more the drama’s plausibility and audience tolerance are tested. In its finest moments, the series evokes memories of the adaptation a few years ago of the author’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the opposing allures and fears offered by science and religion. In its low points, it’s more like Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Still, it does seem to provide the answer to that debated question: “Females, choose the animal.”
The series streams on Disney+ now.
