“The Skylab space station fell out of orbit in 1979. During its mission, it had been home to hundreds of scientific experiments. Most of the debris burned up on re-entry, but some of it crashed to Earth. NASA thought it had recovered every piece. They were wrong.”
Pay attention. This shit is real.
That’s how Cold Storage announces itself, with the confidence of a movie that knows exactly what kind of ride it’s about to take you on. Eighteen years ago, in Western Australia, something nasty slipped through the cracks of human oversight, and now – because of course it does – it’s back, mutating, multiplying, and very keen on ending life as we know it. From that pulpy, deadpan setup, the film barrels forward like a runaway forklift in a self-storage facility built on top of humanity’s worst idea. Subtlety is not the point here. Momentum is.
Directed with a clear love for retro genre mayhem by Johnny Campbell, off a script penned by David Koepp (adapting his own 2019 novel of the same name), Cold Storage wears its influences proudly: a throwback, body-horror-ish, zombie-adjacent sci-fi comedy that feels like an ‘80s midnight movie fed through a modern blockbuster grinder. Yes, there’s a heavy reliance on CGI – sometimes distractingly so – and not every digital squelch lands with the tactile grossness the story begs for. But when it works, it really works, leaning into gooey spectacle, escalating chaos, and the kind of gleeful excess that reminds you why this stuff is best experienced with a crowd, popcorn in hand, half-laughing, half-gagging.
At its core, the film is refreshingly simple in its setup. Teacake (Joe Keery) and Naomi (Georgina Campbell) are low-level employees working the night shift at a self-storage facility built atop a decommissioned U.S. military base – an architectural red flag if there ever was one. Deep below ground, in a sealed sublevel forgotten by time and bureaucracy, a parasitic fungus once deemed too dangerous to destroy has been quietly waiting. When rising temperatures trigger its release, the organism begins to spread with terrifying speed, infecting humans and animals alike and mutating into increasingly grotesque forms. As the facility becomes a labyrinthine death trap, the pair are forced into an uneasy alliance with a grizzled bioterror operative (Liam Neeson) who knows exactly how bad this can get. Containment quickly gives way to survival, and survival escalates into a desperate race to stop a microscopic threat from triggering a very loud, very messy extinction event.
What really sells the madness here is the cast. Keery’s Teacake is exactly the kind of anxious, ill-equipped hero you want trapped in an underground nightmare, whilst Campbell brings grounded intensity and sharp instincts to Naomi, anchoring the film when things threaten to tip into pure cartoon. And then there’s Neeson – deadpan and clearly having a blast – turning what could have been a paycheck role into something weirdly charming. Add in the likes of Lesley Manville (as Neeson’s trusted partner), Vanessa Redgrave (as a long-time storage unit holder), and Sosie Bacon (a Rome-based doctor whose fascination with the fungus in question may prove her last appointment), and it’s almost absurd how stacked the ensemble is for a movie whose central threat is, essentially, weaponised fungus on a bender.
Cold Storage knows it’s not reinventing the wheel – it’s liquefying it, mutating it, and throwing it at your face. It’s big, loud, occasionally messy, and unapologetically designed as a communal experience: jump scares, gasps, laughs, and the shared delight of watching things spiral spectacularly out of control. It may lean too hard on pixels where practical effects would’ve pushed it into cult-classic territory, but even then, it’s hard to deny the sheer fun of the thing.
Gross, goofy, and gleefully unhinged, Cold Storage is exactly what it promises to be: a wild night at the movies where science goes wrong, people panic, and extinction has never looked this entertaining.
THREE AND A HALF STARS (OUT OF FIVE)
Cold Storage is screening in theatres in the United States from February 13th, 2026, before arriving in Australia on March 12th.
