🔗 Share this article

A intense debate recently spread widely on social media, after a user asked a query for females: would you rather be lost in the woods alongside a male or a bear? Similar to the most engaging hypothetical scenarios, it exposed vastly opposing perspectives and life encounters, illuminated divides between the sexes, and was likely cause a deep personal dilemma if you thought on it for too long. There was also the almost inevitable follow-up in which some males came online to tell females how stupid they were to select the bear and went on to limn the punishments they merited for that choice. This at minimum allowed those females who had been hesitating about their decision to decide with a new confidence.

Dramatising the Setup

The Bear-Cooking Tale skillfully brings to life this nifty little setup. This six-episode series is adapted from Swedish author the novelist’s 2018 book with the identical title (translated in 2020 for English readers). It traces the tribulations of a pastor (the lead actor) and his family when they arrive to begin a fresh religious post in Kengis, an isolated settlement in Sweden’s north, during the mid-19th century. In a place with few pleasures, none of the inhabitants especially warm to his puritanical approach to alcohol and dancing, but it is his defense of the poor – especially the native Sami population, from among whom hails the pastor’s foster child Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his conviction in social justice and equal rights that places him on a collision course with the Kengis powers that be.

The Antagonists

Quickly in cahoots against him include the lawman the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the intimidating mill owner the matron Sjödahl (the actress), observed initially dismissing a recently mangled laborer with minimal compensation while he is still gibbering at the sight of his pulped hand, and anyone else who benefit from a community who can be bought for a few bottles of liquor sold by the creepy shopkeeper Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s creepiness diminishes when itinerant painter the artist Beronius arrives in the story (Simon J Berger, delivering an acting turn of rare unsettling intensity). While they remain – similar to the clergyman – only a little more than caricatures, they still serve as effective ones.

Plot Progression

With the seeds of conflict sown, the moment arrives to proceed with the storyline. The maid from the doctor’s house, the character Hilda (the actress), duly vanishes from the woods. Signs of her escape and animal scratches on a tree are found but she is completely absent. Gossip and fears regarding a human-devouring bear roaming the woods circulate, yet the clergyman has another theory which he and his ward embark to verify.

A Strange Creation

This Bear Drama is a slightly odd beast. It conjures a fine sense of the bleakness that lets suspicion and prejudice and dark myths thrive based on local folklore that bears might be dominated or possessed by the spirits of men. And it doesn’t idealising the hardscrabble life experienced by the villagers, where violence, whether that of the wild or people, lurks constantly at the periphery, waiting to erupt. Yet the personas rarely become beyond symbols – or maybe, as the struggles amid fairness and vengeance, rationality and faith, virtue and evil intensify, emblematic figures within a moral tale – which stops the whole thing truly coming to life.

Tonal Inconsistencies

Additionally, exist the many tonally jarring instances in which the pastor’s ability to discover clues and determine the maid’s destiny turns almost risible. He stands observing broken milk pots and clumps of hair within storage sheds as a fusion of Hercule Poirot and Sherlock Holmes – with Jussi a particularly unfortunate assistant figure (none of whom were required to taste a mixture of blood spatter and the boss’s spit to confirm that, yes, it was definitely dried blood on the site), before announcing his latest deduction and pulling a body out of a swamp.

Clashing Agendas

The local leaders are bent on demonstrating that the maid met her end by a bear, perhaps to protect the calm, or possibly to shield a fellow elite. The clergyman is bent on proving otherwise, and the evidence so rapidly accumulates supporting his view that again the drama’s plausibility and the viewer’s patience get strained. In its finest moments, the series evokes memories of the adaptation a few years ago of the author’s The Essex Serpent, through its portrayal of the opposing attractions and fears offered by rational thought and belief. At its worst, it resembles Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Nevertheless, it appears to provide the answer to the earlier query: “Ladies, take the bear.”

• The series streams on Disney+ now.