A heated discussion recently spread widely on social media, after a user posed a query to women: which would you prefer find yourself stranded in the woods alongside a male or with a bear? Like all the most engaging hypothetical scenarios, it revealed vastly opposing worldviews and experiences, illuminated divides among genders, and was likely to induce an existential crisis for anyone pondering about it extensively. There was also the almost inevitable coda where men of a certain stripe came online to tell women how stupid they had been to select the animal and went on to limn the consequences they deserved for it. This at minimum allowed those females who had been hesitating over their choice to make it with renewed assurance.
Dramatising the Setup
The Bear-Cooking Tale skillfully dramatises this clever small premise. The six-part drama is adapted on Scandinavian writer the novelist’s 2018 book with the identical title (translated two years later for English readers). It traces the struggles of a clergyman (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his family as they come to begin a fresh religious post in Kengis, a remote settlement in Sweden’s north, in 1852. Within a community lacking many joys, none of the inhabitants especially appreciate his puritanical stance on drinking and revelry, but it is his defense of the poor – especially the indigenous Sami, from which comes the pastor’s foster child Jussi (the young actor) – and his belief in social justice and equal rights that places him on a collision course with the Kengis local authorities.
The Opposing Forces
Soon in cahoots opposing him are the sheriff the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the fearsome factory proprietor Madam Sjödahl (the actress), observed early on firing a recently mangled worker with minimal compensation while he is still gibbering at the sight of his pulped hand, and all others who profit from a community easily swayed with some containers of the whisky provided by the unsettling store owner Lindmark (the actor). Although, to be fair, Lindmark’s eeriness pales once itinerant painter the artist Beronius appears on the scene (Simon J Berger, delivering an acting turn of exceptional discomfiting power). While they remain – similar to the clergyman – just slightly beyond being stereotypes, they are at least effective ones.
Plot Progression
Once the foundations of tension sown, it is time to get down to narrative business. The servant employed by the doctor, the character Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), duly vanishes from the woods. Indications of her escape and bear markings upon a trunk are found yet she remains completely absent. Rumours and fears of a man/maid-eating bear roaming the woodland spread, yet the clergyman holds a different view that he and Jussi embark to prove.
An Odd Beast
This Bear Drama is a slightly odd beast. It creates a fine sense of the bleakness that allows suspicion and bias and grim legends flourish from the native legend that bears can be controlled or possessed by the spirits of men. It avoids romanticise the hardscrabble life experienced by the villagers, where brutality, whether that of the wild or mankind, always looms at the periphery, waiting to erupt. But the characters rarely become more than ciphers – or maybe, while the conflicts between justice and revenge, logic and religion, good and evil intensify, representative characters within a moral tale – preventing the whole thing truly becoming immersive.
Stylistic Shifts
Additionally, exist numerous stylistically clashing moments where the clergyman’s skill to discover clues and determine the maid’s destiny becomes nearly laughable. He stands observing broken milk pots and clumps of hair in hay barns as a fusion of the Belgian detective and Sherlock Holmes – alongside Jussi a rather hapless assistant figure (none of whom were required to taste a blend of blood spatter and saliva from his superior to confirm that, yes, it was clearly dried blood on the site), before announcing his latest deduction and extracting a corpse from a bog.
Clashing Agendas
The local leaders are determined demonstrating that Hilda was killed by a bear, perhaps to protect the calm, or possibly to shield one of their own. The pastor is intent on establishing the opposite, and the evidence so quickly stacks up in his favour that once more the show’s credibility and the viewer’s patience get strained. At its best, the series is reminiscent of the adaptation a few years ago of the author’s The Essex Serpent, through its portrayal of the competing allures and fears offered by science and belief. In its low points, it’s more like a bear-themed police procedural. Still, it does seem to offer the answer to that debated question: “Females, choose the animal.”
The series is on Disney+ currently.
