A intense discussion recently went viral on social media, following someone posed a query to women: would you rather be lost in a forest with a man or with a bear? Similar to the best thought experiments, it exposed vastly opposing worldviews and life encounters, illuminated divides among genders, and was likely to induce an existential crisis for anyone pondering on it extensively. There was also the almost inevitable coda where men of a certain stripe took to the internet to inform females how stupid they had been for choosing the bear and proceeded to describe the punishments they merited for that choice. This at least enabled the women who were uncertain about their decision to decide with renewed assurance.
Dramatising the Setup
The Bear-Cooking Tale skillfully dramatises this clever little setup. This six-episode drama is adapted from Swedish author the novelist’s 2018 book with the identical title (translated two years later for English readers). It traces the struggles of a clergyman (the lead actor) and his household when they arrive to start a new ministry within Kengis, a remote settlement in northern Sweden, in 1852. Within a community with few pleasures, none of the inhabitants particularly warm to his strict approach to drinking and dancing, but it is his protection of the poor – particularly the indigenous Sami, from among whom hails the preacher’s adopted son Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his conviction in societal fairness and equal rights that places him on a collision course against the Kengis powers that be.
The Opposing Forces
Quickly in cahoots against him are the lawman Brahe (the performer), the fearsome factory proprietor the matron Sjödahl (Pernilla August), observed early on dismissing a recently mangled laborer with minimal compensation as he remains babbling at the sight of his pulped hand, and anyone else who profit from a community who can be bought for a few bottles of the whisky sold by the unsettling shopkeeper the merchant Lindmark (the actor). Although, in fairness, Lindmark’s creepiness diminishes once travelling artist the artist Beronius appears on the scene (Simon J Berger, delivering a performance of rare discomfiting power). While they remain – like the pastor himself – only a little more than caricatures, they still serve as potent archetypes.
Plot Progression
With the seeds of conflict sown, the moment arrives to proceed to narrative business. The maid employed by the doctor, the character Hilda (the actress), duly goes missing from the woods. Indications of her escape and bear markings on a tree get discovered but she is nowhere to be seen. Gossip and anxieties of a man/maid-eating bear prowling the woods spread, but the pastor holds a different view which he and his ward set out to prove.
A Strange Creation
This Bear Drama is a slightly peculiar show. It conjures a fine sense of the bleakness that allows distrust and prejudice and dark myths thrive from the native legend that animals can be controlled or possessed by the souls of humans. And it doesn’t romanticise the tough existence led by the residents, where violence, whether that of nature or people, always looms on the edges, poised to explode. Yet the personas seldom evolve beyond symbols – or perhaps, while the conflicts between justice and revenge, rationality and faith, good and evil intensify, emblematic figures in a fable – which stops the entire production fully becoming immersive.
Tonal Inconsistencies
Additionally, exist the many stylistically clashing moments in which the clergyman’s skill to discover clues and discern Hilda’s fate turns almost risible. He stands observing shattered containers and clumps of hair within storage sheds like a combined Hercule Poirot the English sleuth – with Jussi a rather hapless Hastings-cum-Watson (neither of whom were required to taste a mixture of blood droplets and saliva from his superior to confirm that, yes, it was definitely coagulated blood on the site), prior to declaring his newest conclusion and pulling a corpse from a bog.
Opposing Goals
The village elite are bent on proving that Hilda met her end by an animal, perhaps to preserve the peace, perhaps to protect one of their own. The pastor is intent on establishing the opposite, and the proof so quickly accumulates in his favour that again the drama’s plausibility and audience tolerance are tested. In its finest moments, the series evokes memories of the adaptation some years back of the author’s The Essex Serpent, through its portrayal of the competing attractions and fears offered by science and religion. In its low points, it resembles a bear-themed police procedural. Still, it appears to offer the response to that debated question: “Ladies, take the bear.”
The series is on Disney+ currently.
