An intense debate lately spread widely on social media, following someone posed the question to women: which would you prefer be lost in the woods with a man or a bear? Like all the best hypothetical scenarios, it revealed wildly different perspectives and experiences, illuminated divides among genders, and was likely to induce a deep personal dilemma if you thought on it extensively. Additionally, there came the almost inevitable coda in which men of a certain stripe took to the internet to inform females how stupid they were to select the animal and went on to limn the consequences they deserved for that choice. This at least enabled the women who had been hesitating about their decision to make it with a new confidence.
Dramatising the Scenario
The Bear-Cooking Tale skillfully brings to life this clever small premise. This six-episode drama is adapted on Scandinavian writer the novelist’s 2018 book of the same name (rendered in 2020 for an English audience). It traces the struggles of a pastor (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his household as they come to start a new ministry within Kengis, a remote settlement in northern Sweden, during the mid-19th century. Within a community lacking many joys, none of the inhabitants particularly warm to his strict approach to drinking and revelry, but it is his defense of the poor – especially the native Sami population, from which comes the pastor’s foster child Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in social justice and equality that sets him on a collision course against the Kengis local authorities.
The Antagonists
Soon collaborating against him are the lawman Brahe (the performer), the intimidating mill owner the matron Sjödahl (the actress), seen initially firing a recently mangled worker with a month’s pay as he remains babbling at the sight his crushed hand, and all others who profit from a community easily swayed for a few bottles of liquor provided by the unsettling store owner the merchant Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). However, in fairness, Lindmark’s eeriness pales once travelling artist the artist Beronius appears on the scene (Simon J Berger, providing an acting turn of rare discomfiting power). While they remain – similar to the clergyman – just slightly beyond being stereotypes, they are at least potent archetypes.
Plot Progression
With the seeds of tension sown, the moment arrives to proceed with the storyline. The maid from the doctor’s house, the character Hilda (the actress), duly goes missing from the woods. Signs of her flight and animal scratches on a tree get discovered yet she remains nowhere to be seen. Gossip and anxieties regarding a human-devouring bear prowling the woodland spread, but the pastor has another theory which he and his ward set out to prove.
A Strange Creation
This Bear Drama is a somewhat peculiar show. It conjures a strong impression of the desolation that allows distrust and bias and dark myths thrive based on local folklore that bears might be dominated or possessed by the souls of humans. And it doesn’t idealising the hardscrabble life led by the residents, in which brutality, whether that of nature or people, lurks constantly at the periphery, waiting to erupt. Yet the personas seldom evolve more than ciphers – or maybe, as the struggles between justice and revenge, rationality and faith, good and evil intensify, representative characters within a moral tale – which stops the whole thing fully becoming immersive.
Tonal Inconsistencies
Additionally, there are the many tonally jarring moments where the pastor’s ability in finding evidence and discern the maid’s destiny becomes almost risible. He positions himself looking at broken milk pots and clumps of hair within storage sheds like a combined Hercule Poirot and Sherlock Holmes – with Jussi a rather hapless Hastings-cum-Watson (none of whom were required to lick a blend of blood spatter and the boss’s spit to confirm that indeed, it was definitely dried blood at the crime scene), prior to declaring his latest deduction and extracting a corpse from a bog.
Opposing Goals
The village elite are determined demonstrating that the maid met her end by a bear, perhaps to protect the calm, or possibly to shield one of their own. The pastor is bent on proving the opposite, and the evidence so rapidly accumulates supporting his view that once more the drama’s plausibility and audience tolerance are tested. In its finest moments, the series is reminiscent of the TV version a few years ago of Sarah Perry’s the serpent tale, through its portrayal of the competing allures and fears presented by rational thought and religion. In its low points, it resembles a bear-themed police procedural. Still, it does seem to offer the response to that debated question: “Ladies, take the bear.”
The series streams on Disney+ now.
