How to Blow Up a Pipeline

In cinemas now

Imagine, if you will, that The Breakfast Club had an eco-conscious baby with Reservoir Dogs, and you’d have a fair reading of How to Blow Up a Pipeline. Daniel Goldhaber’s environmentalist thriller, which is adapted from Andreas Malm’s titular non-fiction book, is a tense procedural that is crucially grounded in believable character arcs that are easy to sympathise with.  

Malm’s source material extols the virtues of some controversial forms of activism – in this case, property destruction – and it’s therefore interesting to see Goldhaber and co-writers Ariela Barer (also a key cast member) and Jordan Sjol adopt a view of this that is mostly sympathetic. The motives of the film’s central characters are certainly easy to empathise with, but their actions have the potential to cause significant collateral damage and so are, morally speaking, a grey area.

How to Blow Up a Pipeline is thankfully unafraid to grapple with such quandaries and, while its crescendo makes Goldhaber and co.’s intentions clear, it generally does a good job of walking the ethical tightrope it sets for itself. Crucially, it also works just as effectively when viewed as a standalone thriller, with Goldhaber’s patient pacing and Gavin Brivik’s pulsating, synth-heavy score creating a gripping atmosphere from beginning to last. Tehillah De Castro’s cinematography also lends proceedings an authentically grainy, almost documentary-style feeling that really gives viewers the sense that they are watching something that could be construed as being real-life events, rather than a work of fiction.

Less patient viewers might take umbrage with the meticulous specificity of Goldhaber’s approach, but I found this to be compelling viewing and a rare case of an environmentally focused film conveying a difficult message in a way that doesn’t feel over-egged or preachy.