🔗 Share this article

An intense discussion recently went viral on social media, after a user posed a query to women: which would you prefer find yourself stranded in a forest alongside a male or with a bear? Like all the most engaging hypothetical scenarios, it exposed vastly opposing perspectives and life encounters, illuminated chasms between the sexes, and could easily cause an existential crisis for anyone pondering on it extensively. Additionally, there came the almost inevitable coda where some males took to the internet to tell females how stupid they were for choosing the bear and proceeded to limn the punishments they merited for that choice. This at least enabled the women who had been hesitating about their decision to make it with renewed assurance.

Portraying the Setup

The Bear-Cooking Tale skillfully brings to life this clever little setup. The six-part drama is adapted from Swedish author the novelist’s 2018 book of the same name (translated two years later for English readers). It follows the tribulations of a pastor (the lead actor) and his family as they come to begin a fresh religious post in Kengis, an isolated village in Sweden’s north, in 1852. Within a community lacking many joys, none of the inhabitants particularly warm to his puritanical approach to alcohol and dancing, yet it is his defense of impoverished people – especially the native Sami population, from which hails the pastor’s foster child Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his conviction in societal fairness and equal rights that places him in direct opposition with the Kengis powers that be.

The Opposing Forces

Soon in cahoots opposing him are the sheriff the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the fearsome mill owner the matron Sjödahl (Pernilla August), observed early on dismissing a recently mangled laborer with a month’s pay while he is still babbling at the sight his crushed hand, and anyone else who benefit from a community who can be bought with some containers of the whisky provided by the creepy store owner Lindmark (the actor). Although, in fairness, Lindmark’s creepiness diminishes once itinerant painter the artist Beronius arrives on the scene (Simon J Berger, delivering a performance of rare unsettling intensity). If they are – similar to the clergyman – just slightly beyond than caricatures, they still serve as potent archetypes.

Narrative Development

Once the foundations of conflict planted, the moment arrives to proceed with the storyline. The servant from the doctor’s house, Hilda (the actress), accordingly goes missing in the forest. Signs of her escape and bear markings on a tree are found but she is nowhere to be seen. Gossip and anxieties of a man/maid-eating beast prowling the woodland circulate, yet the clergyman holds a different view that he and Jussi embark to prove.

A Strange Creation

This Bear Drama is a somewhat odd beast. It conjures a strong impression of the desolation that allows suspicion and bias and dark myths thrive based on local folklore that bears can be controlled or possessed by the spirits of humans. It avoids romanticise the tough existence experienced by the villagers, where brutality, be it from nature or people, lurks constantly on the edges, poised to explode. Yet the personas seldom evolve more than ciphers – or maybe, while the conflicts between justice and revenge, rationality and faith, good and evil intensify, emblematic figures in a fable – which stops the entire production fully coming to life.

Stylistic Shifts

Additionally, there are numerous tonally jarring instances in which the clergyman’s skill in finding evidence and discern the maid’s destiny becomes nearly laughable. He positions himself looking at shattered containers and clumps of hair in hay barns like a combined the Belgian detective and Sherlock Holmes – alongside Jussi a particularly unfortunate assistant figure (none of whom were required to taste a blend of blood spatter and saliva from his superior to agree that, yes, it was clearly dried blood at the crime scene), prior to declaring his latest deduction and extracting a corpse out of a swamp.

Opposing Goals

The village elite are determined proving that Hilda was killed by an animal, maybe to preserve the calm, or possibly to protect a fellow elite. The pastor is bent on proving otherwise, and the evidence so rapidly accumulates supporting his view that again the show’s credibility and the viewer’s patience are tested. At its best, the series evokes memories of the adaptation a few years ago of the author’s The Essex Serpent, through its portrayal of the competing attractions and terrors presented by science and religion. In its low points, it’s more like a bear-themed police procedural. Still, it appears to offer the response to the earlier query: “Ladies, take the bear.”

• The series streams on Disney+ now.