A heated discussion lately went viral across online platforms, following a user asked the question for females: would you rather find yourself stranded in a forest alongside a male or a bear? Like all the best thought experiments, it revealed vastly opposing perspectives and experiences, highlighted divides between the sexes, and was likely to induce an existential crisis if you thought on it for too long. There was also the predictable follow-up in which men of a certain stripe took to the internet to tell females how stupid they were to select the bear and went on to describe the punishments they deserved for that choice. This at minimum enabled those females who had been hesitating about their decision to make it with renewed assurance.
Portraying the Scenario
The Bear-Cooking Tale effectively dramatises this clever small premise. The six-part series is adapted from Swedish author Mikael Niemi’s 2018 novel with the identical title (translated two years later for English readers). It traces the tribulations of a pastor (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his family as they come to start a new ministry within Kengis, a remote village in Sweden’s north, in 1852. Within a community with few pleasures, not one of the inhabitants particularly appreciate his puritanical stance on drinking and dancing, yet it is his protection of the poor – especially the native Sami population, from among whom hails the pastor’s foster child the youth Jussi (the young actor) – and his belief in societal fairness and equal rights that places him in direct opposition with the Kengis local authorities.
The Antagonists
Quickly collaborating against him are the lawman Brahe (the performer), the intimidating factory proprietor the matron Sjödahl (the actress), observed early on dismissing a newly injured laborer with a month’s pay as he remains gibbering upon seeing of his pulped hand, and anyone else who benefit from a populace easily swayed with some containers of the whisky provided by the unsettling shopkeeper the merchant Lindmark (the actor). However, in fairness, Lindmark’s eeriness pales once travelling artist Beronius arrives in the story (the performer, providing an acting turn of exceptional discomfiting power). If they are – similar to the clergyman – just slightly beyond being stereotypes, they are at least effective ones.
Plot Progression
With the seeds of tension sown, the moment arrives to proceed to narrative business. The servant from the doctor’s house, the character Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), accordingly vanishes in the forest. Signs of her escape and animal scratches upon a trunk are found yet she remains completely absent. Gossip and anxieties regarding a human-devouring beast roaming the woods spread, but the pastor has another theory which he and his ward set out to prove.
A Strange Creation
This Bear Drama is a slightly odd beast. It creates a strong impression of the desolation that lets distrust and prejudice and grim legends thrive from the native legend that bears can be controlled or possessed by the souls of humans. It avoids romanticise the tough existence experienced by the villagers, in which violence, whether that of the wild or people, lurks constantly at the periphery, waiting to erupt. Yet the personas seldom evolve more than ciphers – or perhaps, while the conflicts amid fairness and vengeance, rationality and faith, virtue and wickedness escalate, representative characters within a moral tale – which stops the entire production truly coming to life.
Tonal Inconsistencies
Additionally, exist numerous stylistically clashing instances in which the clergyman’s skill to discover clues and determine the maid’s destiny turns nearly laughable. He stands observing broken milk pots and clumps of hair within storage sheds like a combined the Belgian detective the English sleuth – alongside Jussi a particularly unfortunate Hastings-cum-Watson (neither of whom had to taste a blend of blood droplets and the boss’s spit to confirm that, yes, it was clearly dried blood on the site), before announcing his newest conclusion and pulling a corpse out of a swamp.
Clashing Agendas
The village elite are bent on demonstrating that Hilda met her end by a bear, maybe to protect the calm, perhaps to shield one of their own. The clergyman is bent on establishing otherwise, and the proof so rapidly stacks up in his favour that again the drama’s plausibility and audience tolerance are tested. In its finest moments, the series is reminiscent of the adaptation a few years ago of the author’s The Essex Serpent, through its portrayal of the competing attractions and fears offered by rational thought and religion. In its low points, it’s more like a bear-themed police procedural. Nevertheless, it appears to provide the response to that debated question: “Females, choose the animal.”
The series streams on Disney+ currently.
