An intense discussion lately went viral on social media, following someone asked a query for females: would you rather find yourself stranded in the woods alongside a male or a bear? Similar to the most engaging thought experiments, it revealed vastly opposing worldviews and life encounters, highlighted chasms among genders, and was likely to induce an existential crisis if you thought on it for too long. There was also the predictable coda where men of a certain stripe came online to tell women how foolish they were to select the animal and proceeded to describe the punishments they deserved for that choice. This at minimum allowed those females who had been hesitating over their choice to decide with renewed assurance.
Portraying the Setup
The Bear-Cooking Tale effectively dramatises this nifty small premise. This six-episode drama is adapted on Scandinavian writer Mikael Niemi’s 2018 novel of the same name (translated in 2020 for English readers). It traces the tribulations of a pastor (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his household as they come to start a fresh religious post within Kengis, a remote village in northern Sweden, during the mid-19th century. Within a community lacking many joys, not one of the locals particularly warm to his puritanical stance on alcohol and dancing, but it is his defense of impoverished people – especially the native Sami population, from which comes the pastor’s adopted son the youth Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in social justice and equality that places him on a collision course with the Kengis powers that be.
The Opposing Forces
Quickly collaborating opposing him are the lawman the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the intimidating factory proprietor the matron Sjödahl (Pernilla August), seen initially dismissing a recently mangled worker with a month’s pay as he remains gibbering at the sight his crushed hand, and all others who benefit from a populace who can be bought for a few bottles of the whisky provided by the creepy shopkeeper the merchant Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s eeriness pales when itinerant painter Beronius appears in the story (Simon J Berger, delivering a performance of rare discomfiting power). If they are – like the pastor himself – just slightly beyond being stereotypes, they still serve as effective ones.
Plot Progression
With the seeds of tension planted, the moment arrives to get down with the storyline. The servant from the doctor’s house, Hilda (the actress), duly vanishes in the forest. Signs of her escape and bear markings on a tree get discovered but she is nowhere to be seen. Rumours and fears regarding a human-devouring beast prowling the woodland circulate, but the pastor holds a different view that he and Jussi set out to verify.
A Strange Creation
This Bear Drama is a slightly peculiar show. It creates a fine sense of the bleakness that allows suspicion and prejudice and grim legends flourish from the native legend that bears can be controlled or inhabited by the spirits of men. It avoids idealising the tough existence led by the villagers, in which brutality, be it from the wild or people, lurks constantly at the periphery, waiting to erupt. Yet the personas rarely become more than ciphers – or maybe, while the conflicts between justice and vengeance, rationality and religion, virtue and evil escalate, emblematic figures within a moral tale – which stops the whole thing fully coming to life.
Tonal Inconsistencies
And then, there are the many tonally jarring moments where the clergyman’s skill to discover clues and discern the maid’s destiny turns almost risible. He stands looking at broken milk pots and clumps of hair within storage sheds like a combined Hercule Poirot the English sleuth – with Jussi a rather hapless Hastings-cum-Watson (none of whom had to lick a mixture of blood spatter and the boss’s spit to agree that, yes, it was definitely coagulated blood at the crime scene), before announcing his newest conclusion and pulling a body out of a swamp.
Clashing Agendas
The local leaders are determined demonstrating that the maid was killed by a bear, perhaps to protect the peace, perhaps to shield one of their own. The clergyman is intent on proving otherwise, and the evidence so quickly stacks up in his favour that again the show’s credibility and the viewer’s patience get strained. In its finest moments, the series is reminiscent of the TV version some years back of the author’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the competing allures and terrors offered by science and religion. At its worst, it resembles a bear-themed police procedural. Nevertheless, it does seem to provide the response to that debated question: “Females, choose the animal.”
The series streams on Disney+ now.
