🔗 Share this article

A heated discussion lately spread widely on social media, after someone asked the question to women: would you rather find yourself stranded in a forest with a man or a bear? Like all the most engaging hypothetical scenarios, it exposed wildly different worldviews and life encounters, illuminated divides between the sexes, and was likely to induce a deep personal dilemma if you thought on it extensively. Additionally, there came the almost inevitable coda in which some males took to the internet to inform females how foolish they had been to select the bear and went on to describe the punishments they merited for it. This at least enabled those females who had been hesitating over their choice to make it with a new confidence.

Portraying the Scenario

The Bear-Cooking Tale effectively brings to life this nifty little setup. The six-part series is adapted on Swedish author Mikael Niemi’s 2018 novel with the identical title (rendered two years later for an English audience). It traces the struggles of a pastor (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his family as they come to start a new ministry in 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 stance on alcohol and revelry, yet it is his defense of impoverished people – especially the native Sami population, from among whom comes the pastor’s foster child Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his conviction in social justice and equality that places him in direct opposition with the Kengis powers that be.

The Opposing Forces

Soon collaborating against him are the lawman Brahe (the performer), the intimidating factory proprietor the matron Sjödahl (Pernilla August), seen initially firing a newly injured laborer with a month’s pay as he remains babbling upon seeing his crushed hand, and anyone else who profit from a community who can be bought for a few bottles of liquor provided by the unsettling shopkeeper Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). Although, to be fair, Lindmark’s creepiness pales when itinerant painter Beronius arrives on the scene (Simon J Berger, delivering a performance of exceptional discomfiting power). If they are – like the pastor himself – just slightly beyond being stereotypes, they still serve as effective ones.

Plot Progression

Once the foundations of tension planted, the moment arrives to proceed to narrative business. The maid employed by the doctor, the character Hilda (the actress), accordingly vanishes from the woods. Signs of her escape and bear markings on a tree are found yet she remains nowhere to be seen. Gossip and anxieties of a man/maid-eating bear roaming the woods spread, but the pastor holds a different view which he and his ward set out to verify.

An Odd Beast

This Bear Drama is a somewhat peculiar show. It creates a fine sense of the desolation that allows suspicion and prejudice and dark myths flourish from the native legend that animals might be dominated or possessed by the souls of humans. And it doesn’t idealising the tough existence experienced by the villagers, in which violence, be it from the wild or people, always looms at the periphery, waiting to erupt. Yet the personas rarely become more than ciphers – or maybe, while the conflicts between justice and revenge, rationality and religion, good and evil intensify, representative characters in a fable – preventing the whole thing fully coming to life.

Stylistic Shifts

And then, exist numerous stylistically clashing instances in which the pastor’s ability to discover clues and discern Hilda’s fate turns almost risible. He positions himself observing broken milk pots and clumps of hair within storage sheds like a combined the Belgian detective and Sherlock Holmes – with Jussi a rather hapless Hastings-cum-Watson (neither of whom were required to taste a mixture of blood spatter and saliva from his superior to agree that indeed, it was definitely dried blood on the site), before announcing his latest deduction and extracting a body from a bog.

Clashing Agendas

The local leaders are determined proving that the maid was killed by a bear, maybe to preserve the calm, perhaps to shield one of their own. The pastor is bent on proving otherwise, and the evidence so quickly stacks up supporting his view that once more the show’s credibility and audience tolerance get strained. At its best, the series evokes memories of the TV version some years back of Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, through its portrayal of the competing allures and terrors presented by rational thought and belief. In its low points, it resembles Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Nevertheless, it appears to offer the answer to the earlier query: “Ladies, take the bear.”

• The series is on Disney+ now.