A heated debate recently went viral on social media, following a user posed a query for females: would you rather be lost in the woods with a man or a bear? Like all the most engaging hypothetical scenarios, it exposed vastly opposing worldviews and life encounters, highlighted chasms between the sexes, and was likely cause a deep personal dilemma for anyone pondering on it extensively. There was also the predictable follow-up where some males came online to tell females how foolish they were for choosing the bear and went on to describe the consequences they merited for it. This at least allowed those females who had been hesitating about their decision to make it with a new confidence.
Portraying the Scenario
The Bear-Cooking Tale effectively dramatises this clever small premise. This six-episode series is adapted on Swedish author Mikael Niemi’s 2018 novel with the identical title (translated in 2020 for an English audience). It traces the tribulations of a pastor (the lead actor) and his family when they arrive to start a new ministry within Kengis, a remote village in northern Sweden, in 1852. In a place with few pleasures, not one of the locals particularly warm to his strict stance on drinking and dancing, yet it is his protection of impoverished people – particularly the indigenous Sami, from which comes the preacher’s adopted son the youth Jussi (the young actor) – and his belief in social justice and equality that places him in direct opposition against the Kengis local authorities.
The Antagonists
Soon in cahoots opposing him are the lawman Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the fearsome factory proprietor Madam Sjödahl (the actress), observed initially dismissing a recently mangled worker with minimal compensation as he remains babbling upon seeing his crushed hand, and anyone else who profit from a populace who can be bought for a few bottles of the whisky provided by the unsettling shopkeeper Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). Although, to be fair, Lindmark’s eeriness diminishes when travelling artist Beronius arrives in the story (Simon J Berger, delivering an acting turn of rare unsettling intensity). While they remain – like the pastor himself – only a little more being stereotypes, they still serve as potent archetypes.
Plot Progression
Once the foundations of tension planted, the moment arrives to get down to narrative business. The maid from the doctor’s house, the character Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), duly goes missing from the woods. Signs of her flight and animal scratches upon a trunk are found but she is nowhere to be seen. Rumours and anxieties regarding a human-devouring bear roaming the woods circulate, but the pastor holds a different view which he and his ward embark to verify.
A Strange Creation
This Bear Drama is a slightly odd beast. It creates a strong impression of the bleakness that lets suspicion and bias and grim legends thrive based on local folklore that animals might be dominated or possessed by the souls of humans. And it doesn’t romanticise the tough existence led by the residents, where violence, be it from the wild or mankind, always looms on the edges, waiting to erupt. Yet the personas rarely become beyond symbols – or maybe, as the struggles amid fairness and revenge, logic and religion, virtue and evil escalate, representative characters within a moral tale – preventing the entire production truly coming to life.
Stylistic Shifts
And then, exist numerous tonally jarring moments where the pastor’s ability to discover clues and discern Hilda’s fate turns almost risible. He positions himself observing shattered containers and clumps of hair in hay barns like a combined Hercule Poirot and Sherlock Holmes – alongside Jussi a rather hapless Hastings-cum-Watson (neither of whom were required to lick a blend of blood spatter and saliva from his superior to confirm that, yes, it was clearly coagulated blood at the crime scene), prior to declaring his newest conclusion and pulling a corpse from a bog.
Clashing Agendas
The village elite are bent on proving that the maid met her end by a bear, maybe to protect the peace, perhaps to protect one of their own. The pastor is intent on establishing otherwise, and the evidence so rapidly stacks up in his favour that again the drama’s plausibility and audience tolerance get strained. In its finest moments, the series evokes memories of the TV version some years back of Sarah Perry’s the serpent tale, with its evocation of the competing attractions and fears presented by science and belief. In its low points, it’s more like a bear-themed police procedural. Nevertheless, it does seem to provide the answer to the earlier query: “Ladies, take the bear.”
The series is on Disney+ currently.
