This is not a story of extinction. If Cocaine Bear (also “based on a true story”) gives us a deranged cautionary tale about mankind’s reckless interference with animal instincts, Nuisance Bear offers the quieter, more unsettling counterpoint: what happens when animals start showing up in human spaces not out of curiosity, but desperation.
Directed by Jack Weisman and Gabriela Osio Vanden, Nuisance Bear expands their 2021 short into a compact, unnerving feature. It won both the Grand Jury and Audience Awards at Sundance, and for good reason. The film begins with a mother polar bear and her two cubs moving across the tundra but soon shifts its gaze to several other bears as they interact with the fringes of civilization. None are anthropomorphized or named. They’re not characters. They’re forces—large, alert, and increasingly displaced.
The setting is Churchill, Manitoba, better known as the polar bear capital of the world. Tourists swarm in through outfitters like Lazy Bear Expeditions, hoping to gawk at apex predators from the safety of a gigantic Tundra Bus.
Some stories are like mazes. They lead us where we didn’t plan to go. This one winds through nature tourism, environmental degradation, and the uneasy evolution of human-animal relationships. Narrated by Mike Tunalaaq Gibbons, the film includes essential cultural and historical framing. There was a time when humans and bears were seen as equals, separate but bound by mutual respect. Climate change has bulldozed that boundary. Now both species share a space neither of them wants to be in.
The cinematography is quietly spectacular. Sweeping aerials of desolate tundra cut to close-up intimate shots of paws, snouts, and heavy breath crystallizing in the cold. Official reports say the polar bear population is shrinking. The local Inuit community isn’t so sure. Their fear isn’t extinction. It’s collision. You can’t hunt safely if a thousand-pound predator is also out there looking for food. In a moment of bleak comedy, the bears are shown outsmarting the very traps meant to contain them. They’ve studied the mechanics and now sidestep them with casual precision. The implication is obvious: the nuisance isn’t the bear.
CONCLUSION: A thoughtful documentary about the intersection of human interests and animal instincts, ‘Nuisance Bear‘ is a beautifully-mounted tone poem about the consequence of humanity reshaping the land.
B
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By: Matt Oakes
Started blogging about film in college when the university paper wouldn’t have him. Dislikes your consensus film Twitter favorites. Devotee of horror movies that make him die a little inside. Catches films at festivals when he can. Proud SFCS and OFCS member and Tomatometer-approved critic. Editor-in-chief of Silver Screen Riot.
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