A heated debate lately went viral across online platforms, after a user asked a query to women: which would you prefer be lost in a forest with a man or a bear? Like all the most engaging thought experiments, it exposed wildly different worldviews and experiences, illuminated divides among genders, and was likely to induce an existential crisis if you thought on it extensively. There was also the almost inevitable follow-up in which men of a certain stripe came online to tell females how foolish they were for choosing the bear and proceeded to limn the consequences they deserved for that choice. This at minimum enabled the women who were uncertain over their choice to make it with renewed assurance.
Portraying the Scenario
The Bear-Cooking Tale effectively brings to life this nifty little setup. The six-part drama is adapted from Swedish author the novelist’s 2018 book with the identical title (translated in 2020 for an English audience). It follows the tribulations of a pastor (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his family when they arrive to begin a fresh religious post within Kengis, an isolated village in northern Sweden, in 1852. Within a community with few pleasures, not one of the inhabitants especially warm to his puritanical approach to drinking and revelry, yet it is his defense of impoverished people – especially the indigenous Sami, from which hails the pastor’s adopted son the youth Jussi (the young actor) – and his belief in social justice and equality that sets him in direct opposition with the Kengis local authorities.
The Opposing Forces
Soon collaborating opposing him are the lawman Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the intimidating factory proprietor the matron Sjödahl (Pernilla August), observed early on dismissing a newly injured worker with minimal compensation as he remains babbling at the sight of his pulped hand, and anyone else who benefit from a community who can be bought with some containers of liquor provided by the creepy shopkeeper Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). Although, to be fair, Lindmark’s creepiness pales once itinerant painter Beronius arrives in the story (Simon J Berger, 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 conflict sown, it is time to get down to narrative business. The servant employed by the doctor, Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), accordingly vanishes in the forest. Indications of her flight and animal scratches upon a trunk are found yet she remains nowhere to be seen. 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 somewhat peculiar show. It creates a strong impression of the desolation that allows suspicion and bias and dark myths flourish from the native legend that bears might be dominated or inhabited by the souls of humans. It avoids idealising the hardscrabble life led by the residents, where brutality, whether that of nature or people, lurks constantly on the edges, waiting to erupt. Yet the personas rarely become more than ciphers – or perhaps, as the struggles amid fairness and revenge, rationality and religion, good and evil intensify, emblematic figures in a fable – which stops the entire production truly becoming immersive.
Tonal Inconsistencies
And then, exist numerous tonally jarring moments in which the clergyman’s skill in finding evidence and discern the maid’s destiny becomes nearly laughable. He positions himself looking at shattered containers and clumps of hair in hay barns like a combined the Belgian detective the English sleuth – with Jussi a rather hapless Hastings-cum-Watson (none of whom had to taste a mixture of blood droplets and saliva from his superior to agree that indeed, it was definitely dried blood at the crime scene), before announcing his latest deduction and pulling a body out of a swamp.
Clashing Agendas
The local leaders are determined proving that the maid was killed by a bear, maybe to protect the calm, perhaps to shield a fellow elite. The pastor is intent on proving the opposite, 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 TV version a few years ago of Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, through its portrayal of the competing allures and terrors presented by rational thought and religion. In its low points, it resembles a bear-themed police procedural. Nevertheless, it does seem to provide the answer to that debated question: “Females, choose the animal.”
The series is on Disney+ currently.
