A intense discussion lately went viral on social media, following a user posed the question to women: would you rather find yourself stranded in the woods with a man or with a bear? Like all the best thought experiments, it revealed wildly different perspectives and experiences, highlighted divides between the sexes, and could easily cause a deep personal dilemma if you thought on it extensively. There was also the almost inevitable coda in which men of a certain stripe took to the internet to inform women how foolish they had been to select the bear and went on to limn the punishments they merited for it. This at minimum allowed those females who were uncertain about their decision to make it with renewed assurance.
Portraying the Scenario
The Bear-Cooking Tale effectively dramatises this clever little setup. The six-part drama is adapted from Swedish author the novelist’s 2018 book of the same name (rendered in 2020 for an English audience). It traces the tribulations of a clergyman (the lead actor) and his household as they come to begin a new ministry in Kengis, an isolated settlement in Sweden’s north, during the mid-19th century. In a place with few pleasures, none of the locals especially appreciate his strict stance on drinking and dancing, yet it is his defense of impoverished people – particularly the native Sami population, from which hails the preacher’s foster child the youth Jussi (the young actor) – and his conviction in societal fairness and equality that places him in direct opposition against the Kengis local authorities.
The Opposing Forces
Quickly collaborating opposing him are the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the intimidating mill owner the matron Sjödahl (the actress), seen initially dismissing a recently mangled laborer with a month’s pay while he is still babbling at the sight of his pulped hand, and all others who profit from a community who can be bought with some containers of the whisky provided by the creepy store owner Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). Although, in fairness, Lindmark’s creepiness diminishes once travelling artist the artist Beronius arrives on the scene (the performer, delivering an acting turn of rare discomfiting power). If they are – like the pastor himself – only a little more than caricatures, they are at least effective ones.
Narrative Development
With the seeds of conflict planted, the moment arrives to get down with the storyline. The servant from the doctor’s house, the character Hilda (the actress), duly vanishes in the forest. Indications of her flight and bear markings on a tree are found but she is completely absent. Rumours and fears of a man/maid-eating beast prowling the woodland circulate, yet the clergyman holds a different view which he and his ward set out to verify.
An Odd Beast
This Bear Drama is a slightly peculiar show. It conjures a strong impression of the bleakness that lets suspicion and bias and grim legends flourish based on local folklore that bears might be dominated or possessed by the souls of humans. And it doesn’t romanticise the tough existence experienced by the villagers, in which brutality, whether that of the wild or people, always looms on the edges, waiting to erupt. But the characters seldom evolve more than ciphers – or perhaps, while the conflicts between justice and vengeance, logic and faith, virtue and wickedness intensify, emblematic figures within a moral tale – which stops the whole thing fully becoming immersive.
Stylistic Shifts
And then, exist numerous stylistically clashing instances in which the pastor’s ability to discover clues and discern the maid’s destiny becomes almost risible. He stands looking at broken milk pots and clumps of hair in hay barns as a fusion of the Belgian detective the English sleuth – alongside Jussi a particularly unfortunate assistant figure (neither of whom were required to taste a blend of blood spatter and the boss’s spit to agree that, yes, it was clearly dried blood on the site), prior to declaring his newest conclusion and extracting a corpse out of a swamp.
Clashing Agendas
The village elite are bent on proving that the maid was killed by a bear, perhaps to preserve the calm, or possibly to protect a fellow elite. The clergyman is intent on proving the opposite, and the evidence so quickly stacks up in his favour that again the drama’s plausibility and audience tolerance are tested. At its best, the series evokes memories of the adaptation some years back of the author’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the competing attractions and fears offered by rational thought and belief. In its low points, it’s more like a bear-themed police procedural. Still, it does seem to offer the answer to that debated question: “Ladies, take the bear.”
The series streams on Disney+ currently.
