Cold Storage – Movie Review (4/5)

COLD STORAGE is a new Sci-Fi Horror Comedy starring Joe Keery and Georgina Campbell. It’s a lot of fun and also gets extremely physical with the dangerous fungus, not unlike the one genre fans will recognize from The Last of Us. Liam Neeson and Lesley Manville also shine in supporting roles. Read our full Cold Storage movie review here!

COLD STORAGE is a new Horror Comedy with a Sci-Fi plot. From reading the plot to seeing the cast, I expected to like this. As a pleasant surprise, I absolutely loved it. Most of the characters have much more depth than what you usually see, and even with a runtime just shy of 100 minutes, we get to know them.

Also, the comedy is dark and full of satire, which always speaks to my black horror-comedy-loving heart. The big enemy in this story is an alien fungus, but also the U.S. government, which did not do its job in keeping that deadly fungus locked away safely. Of course, the heroes are also Americans, so it works.

Continue reading our Cold Storage movie review below. Find it in theaters beginning Friday the 13th of February, 2026.

Well, that escalated quickly

I absolutely love it when a movie opens with a crazy scene. Think Sam Raimi‘s Drag Me to Hell or James Wan‘s The Conjuring, where you witness something that sets the tone, but then the story continues somewhere else. Well, that’s what we get with Cold Storage, where Liam Neeson and Lesley Manville portray two government agents sent to secure something that came from outer space.

Okay, it’s not that simple, but this is still what happens. They actually arrive with Dr. Hero Martins (Sosie Bacon, who excels at opening horror movies with a bang), and things escalate extremely fast from there. What we witness in this opening scene is a small taste of the madness that will impact a self-storage company 18 years later.

At this self-storage company, we follow the two young employees, Teacake (Joe Keery) and Naomi (Georgina Campbell), as they are about to have the craziest night of their lives. It turns out the self-storage location was built on the site of an old US military base. A base full of secrets that were never supposed to be let out.

This includes the parasitic fungus from outer space. The very same thing that makes the opening scene of Cold Storage so intense.

Fight the fungus

Speaking of “cold storage”, the title comes from the fungus being placed in the lowest sublevel of the base. Here, it was kept dormant (well, supposedly) after having been sealed by the government nearly two decades before. Well, now this highly contagious and rapidly mutating microorganism from space is unleashing its brain-controlling terrors on anyone and anything it can get close to.

We’re talking The Last of Us, but where the fungus infects its inhabitants much quicker. Whether human or animal, and yes, we will see quite a few animals infected. All are clearly CGI creatures, which this animal lover is always appreciative of.

To fight back, they manage (in a roundabout way) to get in touch with the retired bioterror operative (Liam Neeson), who came across this fungus decades earlier. The only thing that matters now is that it must be contained… otherwise, it could very well be the end of the world as we know it. Not just for mankind, but for all living creatures.

Alongside Joe Keery (Stranger Things), Georgina Campbell (Barbarian), Sosie Bacon (Smile), Lesley Manville (Grotesquerie), and Liam Neeson (Taken), we also have Vanessa Redgrave (Mission: Impossible), Gavin Spokes (Wake Up Dead Man), and Ellora Torchia (Midsommar) in key supporting roles.

Watch Cold Storage in theaters

Cold Storage is directed by Jonny Campbell (BBC & Netflix production Dracula, Westworld). The screenplay comes from acclaimed writer David Koepp. A name that should sound familiar, as David Koepp has written such iconic screenplays as Death Becomes Her (1992), Jurassic Park (1993), Mission: Impossible (1996), Panic Room (2002), and even a ghost story like Presence (2024).

With Cold Storage, he also wrote the novel of the same name, so this time, David Koepp is adapting a screenplay based on his own novel. This new sci-fi horror-comedy is produced by Gavin Polone. He has expert experience with the hybrid genre from producing the Zombieland movies.

I love that Cold Storage is coming out on the first Friday the 13th of 2026. And yes, this also happens to be the day before Valentine’s Day. Since this movie also has a lot of heart, it could be the perfect date movie and the fun horror ride you enjoy on Friday the 13th. Cold Storage is, understandably, a highly anticipated horror-comedy coming exclusively to 2000+ theaters nationwide.

Cold Storage premieres in theaters on February 13, 2026.

Details

Director: Jonny Campbell
Script: David Koepp
Cast: Joe Keery, Georgina Campbell, Sosie Bacon, Vanessa Redgrave, Lesley Manville, Liam Neeson