A heated discussion recently spread widely across online platforms, after someone posed a query for females: which would you prefer find yourself stranded in a forest alongside a male or with a bear? Similar to the best hypothetical scenarios, it revealed wildly different worldviews and life encounters, illuminated chasms between the sexes, and could easily to induce an existential crisis for anyone pondering on it extensively. There was also the predictable follow-up in which some males took to the internet to inform females how stupid they had been for choosing the bear and went on to describe the punishments they merited for it. This at minimum enabled the women who had been hesitating over their choice to decide with a new confidence.
Portraying the Scenario
The Bear-Cooking Tale skillfully brings to life this clever little setup. This six-episode series is based on Scandinavian writer Mikael Niemi’s 2018 novel of the same name (translated two years later for English readers). It follows the struggles of a clergyman (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his household as they come to start a fresh religious post in Kengis, a remote village in Sweden’s north, during the mid-19th century. Within a community lacking many joys, none of the inhabitants especially warm to his strict stance on drinking and dancing, but it is his defense of impoverished people – especially the native Sami population, from which hails the pastor’s foster child the youth Jussi (the young actor) – and his conviction in societal fairness and equal rights that places him in direct opposition against the Kengis powers that be.
The Antagonists
Soon collaborating opposing him are the lawman Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the intimidating mill owner Madam Sjödahl (Pernilla August), observed early on firing a recently mangled laborer with minimal compensation as he remains gibbering at the sight his crushed hand, and anyone else who profit from a community easily swayed for a few bottles of liquor sold by the creepy store owner Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). Although, in fairness, Lindmark’s creepiness pales once itinerant painter Beronius appears on the scene (the performer, providing a performance of rare unsettling intensity). If they are – like the pastor himself – just slightly beyond being stereotypes, they are at least potent archetypes.
Plot Progression
With the seeds of tension planted, the moment arrives to get down to narrative business. The maid from the doctor’s house, Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), duly goes missing from the woods. Indications of her escape and bear markings on a tree are found yet she remains completely absent. Rumours and fears of a man/maid-eating beast prowling the woodland circulate, 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 conjures a strong impression of the desolation that allows distrust and bias and grim legends thrive from the native legend that bears can be controlled or inhabited by the spirits of men. It avoids idealising the hardscrabble life led by the residents, where brutality, whether that of the wild or people, lurks constantly at the periphery, waiting to erupt. But the characters rarely become more than ciphers – or maybe, as the struggles amid fairness and revenge, rationality and faith, virtue and wickedness escalate, representative characters in a fable – which stops the whole thing fully coming to life.
Tonal Inconsistencies
Additionally, exist the many tonally jarring moments in which the clergyman’s skill in finding evidence and determine Hilda’s fate turns nearly laughable. He stands observing shattered containers and clumps of hair in hay barns like a combined the Belgian detective the English sleuth – with Jussi a particularly unfortunate Hastings-cum-Watson (neither of whom were required to taste a blend of blood droplets and the boss’s spit to agree that indeed, it was clearly dried blood at the crime scene), prior to declaring his newest conclusion and pulling a corpse from a bog.
Opposing Goals
The village elite are determined demonstrating that Hilda was killed by an animal, perhaps to preserve the peace, perhaps to protect one of their own. The pastor is bent on proving the opposite, and the evidence so quickly stacks up supporting his view that once more the show’s credibility and the viewer’s patience get strained. In its finest moments, the series evokes memories of the adaptation some years back of the author’s the serpent tale, through its portrayal of the opposing attractions and fears presented by science and belief. At its worst, it’s more like Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Still, it appears to offer the response to that debated question: “Females, choose the animal.”
The series streams on Disney+ currently.
