Dir. Jonny Campbell, US, 2026, 99 mins, in English

Cast: Joe Keery, Georgina Campbell, Liam Neeson, Lesley Manville, Vanessa Redgrave, Ellora Torchia

Review by Colin Dibben

A prologue zooms to Western Australia in the late 1970s, where bio-terrorism expert Robert Quinn (Neeson) and Trini Romano (Manville) are dealing with a messy situation: a mutated fungus brought back from space on the disintegrating Skylab space station.

The fungus enters the mammalian body, takes it over fast, then explodes to spread its now visceral spores in the widest possible arc.

Fast forward to today: “Pay attention, this shit is real” an on-screen announcement tells us. A sample of the fungus has been stored safely in an underground military bunker since the Australian event. The bunker has been sealed up and sold off to a self-storage company. Enter Gen Z slacker and parolee ‘Teacake’ aka Travis (Keery) and focused newbie Naomi (Campbell). Both of them McJobbing the hell out of their onsite facility guardian/ customer relations roles.

The younguns get curious when they hear an alarm sounding dully behind sheet board. They decide to investigate. Turns out that climate change has caused the safety mechanism in the bunker to fail and the fungus is unleashing through a vent.

Naomi and Teacake are soon triangulating like mofos with Quinn, through a Homeland Security call centre operative Abigail (Torchia). Their goal: stop the fungus destroying first Kansas and then the world.

Despite the on-screen admonishment, there isn’t very much to pay attention to: visually the film’s prologue is the most impressive bit, with echoes of The Crazies and Close Encounters … although there are enough yucky explosions of people to keep most horror fans happy. The film’s comic mode defuses much of the tension, and the supposedly witty repartee between Teacake and Naomi largely falls flat.

Neeson is good as always, marking that moment when the straight man of action flips into irony, faced with the limits of his own abilities and the state of the world itself. Lesley Manville has fun as his chain-smoking sidekick and it is nice to see Vanessa Redgrave as a customer in her storage unit, kissing what looks like a picture of a young Franco Nero while fondling his handgun.

This is good fun to watch but I think I am not being unreasonable to expect more from the writer behind Jurassic Park, Indiana Jones, Mission Impossible, Death Become Her, Carlito’s Way and Stir of Echoes.

Cold Storage is out in cinemas on 20 February 2026.