Cold Storage
A surprisingly starry cast brings gravitas to Jonny Campbell’s schlocky sci-fi yarn which proves as scary as it is hilarious.
The strangest thing: Georgina Campbell and Joe Keery
Image courtesy of StudioCanal.
by JAMES CAMERON-WILSON
Things you thought you’d never see: Joe Keery (Steve Harrington in Stranger Things) sharing a scene with a gun-toting Dame Vanessa Redgrave, now 89. Indeed, Jonny Campbell’s hymn to classic comic schlock-horror keeps the incongruities flying until the very last frame. To balance suspense, extreme gore and laugh-out-loud comedy is a hard act to accomplish, but Campbell has really pulled it off and has all but guaranteed a future cult classic. There are tropes aplenty, and Campbell – working from David Koepp’s ingenious script – repeatedly spins them on their head while serving the spine of what is a rather nifty premise. Two elements exhibit enormous cinematic potential here: the self-storage lock-up facility and a self-serving fungus supercharged by scientific tampering.
The Atchison Self-Storage Facility in Kansas contains a labyrinth of secret worlds, its contents known only to its customers. But behind this glistening 24-hour compound there lies something entirely more sinister, this facility having been built on top of a former military storage site, long forgotten by all but some long-retired Pentagon personnel.
Being a loyal template of many a sci-fi yarn, Cold Storage kicks off with a prologue and a big-screen caption: “Pay attention. This shit is real.” So the tone is set and we discover that back in 1979 an oxygen tank from the Skylab space station broke away and survived the burn-up of the Earth’s atmosphere to land somewhere in Western Australia. Eighteen years later, the biochemist Dr Hero Martins (Sosie Bacon) gets a call from an Australian backwater which has built a makeshift Skylab museum around the tank and is now suffering some serious fallout. When Dr Martins arrives, joined by a pair of veteran Pentagon ‘bioterror operatives’, played by Liam Neeson and Lesley Manville, the entire population is dead. Martins quickly assesses the situation and realises that a heliotropic, “intensely adaptable fungus” has leaked out of the tank and is posing a major threat to the future of mankind.
Cut to the present and we find the security guard Travis ‘Teacake’ Meacham (Joe Keery) on the night shift reading his well-thumbed copy of The Body Snatchers. It’s a boring gig, but Teacake needs the job and is cheered up no end with the arrival of a new guard, Naomi (Georgina Campbell), who is suitably easy on the eye. Then they hear a strange beeping sound which they are determined to locate, even though it appears to be coming from behind the wall of the reception area…
There’s more than a dash of Stranger Things here, along with a whole bunch of not dissimilar sources. David Koepp, who has scripted such films as Jurassic Park, War of the Worlds (2005) and Steven Spielberg’s upcoming sci-fi epic Disclosure Day, knows this oeuvre well and has scattered references, in-jokes, allusions and Easter eggs throughout, along with some priceless needle drops. The scene of an infected cockroach scuttling at high speed through the entrails of the compound to the sound of Blondie’s ‘One Way or Another’ is a sequence to remember. Or when Liam Neeson, seeing Lesley Manville after all these years, comments, “how is it possible that you are still alive?” (cf. Ordinary Love). It’s a jolt, too, to see Neeson, who is 73, playing his own age, complete with debilitating back problems. Representing the younger generation, Keery and Campbell are a gas together, with the latter scream princess (Barbarian, The Watchers) showing that she’s got a real talent for comedy. The film is very funny, but it’s also grotesque and for much of the time genuinely suspenseful. The key to its success, above all, is that it knows exactly where it’s coming from, by sending up the genre it is celebrating.
Cast: Georgina Campbell, Joe Keery, Sosie Bacon, Vanessa Redgrave, Lesley Manville, Liam Neeson, Ellora Torchia, Gavin Spokes, Darrell D'Silva, Rob Collins, Andrew Brooke, Daniel Rigby, Clare Holman.
Dir Jonny Campbell, Pro Gavin Polone and David Koepp, Screenplay David Koepp, from his novel of the same name, Ph Tony Slater Ling, Pro Des Elena Albanese, Ed Billy Sneddon, Music Mathieu Lamboley, Costumes Nicoletta Ercole, Sound Vincent Cosson, Dialect coach Zabarjad Budgie Salam.
StudioCanal/Pariah-Studio Canal.
98 mins. USA/France/Italy. 2026. US Rel: 13 February 2026. UK Rel: 20 February 2026. Cert. 15.
