An heated debate lately spread widely on social media, after someone posed a query to women: which would you prefer be lost in the woods with a man or with a bear? Like all the best hypothetical scenarios, it exposed wildly different worldviews and experiences, highlighted chasms between the sexes, and was likely cause a deep personal dilemma for anyone pondering on it extensively. There was also the almost inevitable coda in which some males came online to inform females how stupid they had been to select the animal and went on to limn the consequences they deserved for it. This at minimum allowed the women who were uncertain about their decision to decide with renewed assurance.
Portraying the Setup
The Bear-Cooking Tale effectively brings to life this nifty little setup. This six-episode drama is adapted on Scandinavian writer Mikael Niemi’s 2018 novel with the identical title (rendered in 2020 for an English audience). It traces the struggles of a clergyman (the lead actor) and his family as they come to begin a new ministry within Kengis, an isolated village in northern Sweden, in 1852. Within a community lacking many joys, not one of the locals particularly appreciate his puritanical stance on alcohol and dancing, but it is his protection of impoverished people – especially the indigenous Sami, from which hails the pastor’s adopted son the youth Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his conviction in societal fairness and equal rights that sets him on a collision course with the Kengis local authorities.
The Opposing Forces
Quickly collaborating against him include the lawman the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the intimidating mill owner the matron Sjödahl (the actress), observed initially firing a newly injured worker with a month’s pay as he remains babbling upon seeing his crushed hand, and all others who profit from a populace easily swayed with some containers of the whisky provided by the unsettling store owner the merchant Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). However, in fairness, Lindmark’s creepiness pales when travelling artist Beronius arrives in the story (Simon J Berger, delivering a performance of rare discomfiting power). If they are – similar to the clergyman – only a little more than caricatures, they are at least effective ones.
Plot Progression
Once the foundations of conflict planted, the moment arrives to get down to narrative business. The servant from the doctor’s house, the character Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), duly goes missing from the woods. Signs of her escape and animal scratches upon a trunk are found yet she remains completely absent. Rumours and anxieties of a man/maid-eating bear prowling the woods circulate, but the pastor holds a different view that he and Jussi set out to verify.
A Strange Creation
This Bear Drama is a slightly odd beast. It conjures a fine sense of the desolation that allows suspicion and bias and grim legends flourish based on local folklore that bears can be controlled or inhabited by the souls of humans. And it doesn’t idealising the hardscrabble life experienced by the villagers, where violence, whether that of the wild or people, always looms on the edges, poised to explode. Yet the personas seldom evolve more than ciphers – or maybe, while the conflicts amid fairness and revenge, rationality and religion, virtue and wickedness escalate, emblematic figures within a moral tale – which stops the whole thing fully coming to life.
Stylistic Shifts
And then, exist numerous tonally jarring moments in which the clergyman’s skill in finding evidence and discern the maid’s destiny turns nearly laughable. He stands looking at broken milk pots and strands of fur in hay barns as a fusion of Hercule Poirot the English sleuth – with Jussi a rather hapless assistant figure (none of whom were required to lick a mixture of blood spatter and the boss’s spit to confirm that, yes, it was definitely dried blood at the crime scene), before announcing his newest conclusion and pulling a corpse out of a swamp.
Clashing Agendas
The village elite are bent on demonstrating that Hilda was killed by a bear, perhaps to preserve the calm, perhaps to shield a fellow elite. The clergyman is intent on establishing 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 evokes memories of the adaptation a few years ago of Sarah Perry’s the serpent tale, with its evocation of the competing allures and terrors presented by rational thought and religion. In its low points, it resembles Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Nevertheless, it appears to offer the response to the earlier query: “Ladies, take the bear.”
The series is on Disney+ now.
