Will Penn keeps his cool with his review of Cold Storage.
Cold Storage is a pulsating body horror comedy that is as contagious as it is feverish. A simple premise frames the ensuing madness: in 1979, a Skylab oxygen tank crashes in the outback of Western Australia, carrying a highly contagious, rapidly mutating parasitic fungus to a small village. Robert Quinn, played by Liam Neeson, sees the horror of a new virus, watching as it takes over a host and bursts her open from the inside out. He seals it away in a high-security government facility, hoping the world never has to find out.
With some unique editing, we jump forward to present-day Kansas, where the facility has been converted into a commercial self-storage unit. We meet Teacake (Joe Keery) and Naomi (Georgina Campbell), two bored, low-level storage workers on a night shift, playing dares and investigating a mysterious beeping. By the time they realise the severity of what has been unleashed, and how wholly unequipped they are to deal with it, it already seems too late. Neeson's retired bioterror operative Robert Quinn is kicked back into action.
As the film unfolds, one has the intense sense that everyone involved is having a deliriously good time. After all, it is the simple things that make Cold Storage such infectious fun. A well-timed COVID joke, a faulty nuclear bomb, or bilious and bloated gore all make for a genuine hoot as Keery and Campbell bounce off one another with excellent chemistry. Dublin actor Aaron Heffernan is a feverish delight, unrecognisable in the role of festering ex-husband. Neeson, who is thriving in his comedy renaissance following The Naked Gun, brings a deadpan gravitas to great comic effect. He delivers his plan to detonate a nuclear bomb to the unwitting Teacake and Naomi with the breezy confidence of a man proposing a slightly inconvenient but entirely sensible solution.
The creeping infection story, the gore, the spreading sense of panic all sound like well-trodden ground. And it is, but the ensemble cast deliver their lines with such campy, visceral splatter-horror commitment that it hardly matters. While it follows many of the tropes of its genre, Cold Storage executes them with a virulent sense of fun.
Cold Storage is in cinemas 20th February 2026.
