An intense debate recently spread widely 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 thought experiments, it revealed wildly different worldviews and life encounters, illuminated chasms between the sexes, and could easily cause an existential crisis if you thought on it for too long. Additionally, there came the predictable follow-up in which men of a certain stripe took to the internet to inform females how foolish they were to select the bear and went on to describe the consequences they merited for that choice. This at least allowed the women who had been hesitating over their choice to decide with a new confidence.
Dramatising the Setup
The Bear-Cooking Tale effectively dramatises this clever small premise. The six-part drama is adapted on Scandinavian writer Mikael Niemi’s 2018 novel of the same name (rendered in 2020 for an English audience). It traces the struggles of a pastor (the lead actor) and his family as they come to begin a new ministry within Kengis, an isolated settlement in northern Sweden, during the mid-19th century. Within a community with few pleasures, not one of the locals particularly warm to his puritanical approach to drinking and dancing, yet it is his protection of the poor – especially the native Sami population, from which comes the pastor’s foster child the youth Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his conviction in social justice and equal rights that places him in direct opposition against the Kengis local authorities.
The Antagonists
Quickly in cahoots against him include the sheriff the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the intimidating mill owner the matron Sjödahl (the actress), seen initially firing a recently mangled worker with a month’s pay as he remains gibbering upon seeing his crushed hand, and all others who benefit from a populace who can be bought with some containers of liquor sold by the creepy shopkeeper the merchant Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). However, in fairness, Lindmark’s creepiness pales when travelling artist the artist Beronius arrives in the story (the performer, delivering a performance of exceptional unsettling intensity). While they remain – similar to the clergyman – only a little more being stereotypes, they are at least potent archetypes.
Narrative Development
Once the foundations of conflict sown, it is time to get down to narrative business. The servant employed by the doctor, Hilda (the actress), accordingly goes missing from the woods. Signs of her flight and animal scratches on a tree are found but she is nowhere to be seen. Rumours and anxieties of a man/maid-eating beast roaming the woods circulate, but the pastor holds a different view which he and his ward embark to prove.
A Strange Creation
This Bear Drama is a somewhat odd beast. It creates a fine sense of the bleakness that lets suspicion and bias and dark myths thrive based on local folklore that animals might be dominated or possessed by the souls of men. It avoids romanticise the hardscrabble life experienced by the villagers, in which brutality, be it from the wild or mankind, always looms on the edges, waiting to erupt. But the characters seldom evolve beyond symbols – or perhaps, as the struggles between justice and vengeance, rationality and faith, good and wickedness intensify, representative characters in a fable – which stops the whole thing fully coming to life.
Stylistic Shifts
Additionally, there are the many stylistically clashing instances in which the pastor’s ability in finding evidence and discern the maid’s destiny becomes nearly laughable. He positions himself looking at broken milk pots and strands of fur within storage sheds like a combined Hercule Poirot the English sleuth – alongside Jussi a rather hapless assistant figure (neither of whom were required to lick a blend of blood droplets and the boss’s spit to confirm that, yes, it was definitely dried blood on the site), prior to declaring his newest conclusion and pulling a corpse out of a swamp.
Clashing Agendas
The village elite are determined proving that the maid was killed by a bear, maybe to preserve the peace, perhaps to shield a fellow elite. The clergyman is intent on proving the opposite, and the evidence so quickly stacks up in his favour that once more the drama’s plausibility and audience tolerance get strained. At its best, the series evokes memories of the TV version a few years ago of the author’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the opposing attractions and terrors offered by rational thought and religion. At its worst, it resembles Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Nevertheless, it does seem to offer the answer to the earlier query: “Ladies, take the bear.”
The series streams on Disney+ currently.
