Director: Jonny Campbell
Screenplay: David Koepp
Cinematography: Tony Slaterling
Starring: Joe Keery, Georgina Campbell, Liam Neeson, Lesley Manville, Sosie Bacon, Vanessa Redgrave
Year: 2026
Duration: 99 mins
Country: USA/France
Rating: 15
Cold Storage arrives at a time when screenwriter David Koepp is reappearing on the scene having written the latest Jurassic adventure, Jurassic World Rebirth last year, and also next month he will have his first partnership with Spielberg since 2008’s Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull with the sci-fi thriller, Disclosure Day. Filmed back in 2023, Cold Storage has spent nearly three years on the shelf but arrives now at something of a Koepp moment.
Cold Storage is based upon his own novel from 2019 and follows the accidental release of a somewhat extraterrestrial fungus into a storage company’s lockup. Running the night shift is Travis or Teacake as he is known (played by Joe Keery) and single mum Naomi (played by Georgina Campbell). They have to make sure everyone that is infected stays inside before the only man that can save the day, injured bioterror operative Robert Quinn (played by Liam Neeson), arrives to dispatch the zombie-like infected.
For the most part this is a solid little infection horror film with some fun gory moments and adequate jump scares. The horror is very much of the cartoon variety and the slightly uncanny CGI doesn’t help it. While watching the credits I noticed that this was filmed in Italy and Morocco and it made me yearn for this to be like those brilliant low budget European splatter-fests from the 70s and 80s. If the gore was practical I would be praising this much more than I am.
The central performances from Keery and Campbell are good and if there is one thing that Koepp can do really well it’s sarcastic dialogue and both excel in their scenes together. Liam Neeson gets an ‘and’ credit and he really doesn’t have much to do apart from the opening and the climax. He’s mainly just getting very cross with people on the phone who won’t believe him as to the importance of the issue at hand. Rounding out the cast there is Vanessa Redgrave as a storage facility customer who really doesn’t have much of a part once the story gets going. There’s Lesley Manville who is perhaps the most fun addition to the cast as Neeson’s slightly unhinged right hand woman. Also in the film’s inciting incident we get Sosie Bacon as our intrepid biochemist Dr. Hero Martins who traces the fungus origins to a crashed Skylab oxygen tank in Western Australia.
Jonny Campbell returns to feature directing for the first time since Alien Autopsy (2006) that starred Saturday Night essentials Ant and Dec. He manages to handle the scary moments well and there are some disconcerting scenes and angles while our stars are being stalked by the various infected humans and animals. My biggest gripe with the film is its plotting and heavy reliance on expository dialogue at the start and the use of titles before the film gets going. Unless it’s Star Wars I really do dislike films starting with text and I’m seeing it more and more with sci-fi films at the moment. Please find a more elegant way to introduce us to the story. The fluorescent lighting of the lockup means that we are never really aware of the passage of time and so the story does have that nightmare quality which is appreciated but never really explored to its fullest.
The film arrives on home entertainment via StudioCanal and the disc, while bare bones, has great image quality and Dolby Atmos enabled so you can hear the tiniest of squelches that exude from our near dead.
This is a fun but throwaway teenage gateway horror that will likely find an eager audience at sleepovers. I would however highly recommend Koepp’s original novel if you are after a Crichton techno-thriller.
