If you thought mushrooms were just the annoying things that ruined your sourdough starter or the trendy ingredient in your overpriced coffee, Cold Storage has news for you. Fungi can also be the catalyst for a zombie apocalypse, and the only thing standing between humanity and brain-rot is Liam Neeson’s bad back and the combined minimum-wage competence of two retail employees. Sleep well tonight.
David Koepp, whose resume includes Jurassic Park, Mission: Impossible, and Spider-Man but whose heart apparently belongs to inventive genre exercises like Stir of Echoes and Presence, adapts his own 2019 novel here with gleeful disregard for good taste. The premise mashes up The Andromeda Strain with The Return of the Living Dead: a mutated fungus gets loose in an underground government storage facility, and thanks to budget cuts and administrative indifference, containing the outbreak falls to whoever happens to be on shift when the alarm goes off.
Jonny Campbell directs with the efficiency of someone who knows that the best monster movies prioritize pace over ponderousness. After a prologue establishes the cosmic stakes—featuring a cameo by Sosie Bacon as a xeno-mycologist who meets exactly the fate you’d expect for someone who studies alien fungi—the film grounds itself in the bureaucratic nightmare of modern government contracting. The high-security containment unit has been downsized into a forgotten corner of a slightly sketchy commercial storage facility, because nothing says “secure biological threat” like a facility that also stores someone’s grandmother’s furniture.
Liam Neeson stars as Quinn, a crisis specialist called out of retirement who brings genial crankiness and a genuine physical limitation to the role. His bad back isn’t a character trait so much as a plot device that prevents him from single-handedly solving everything, forcing him to rely on Teacake and Naomi, played by Joe Keery and Georgina Campbell. Keery, best known as the heartthrob with the haircut from Stranger Things, proves he can handle comedy and terror in equal measure, while Campbell brings the same grounded intensity that made Barbarian so effective.
The film also brings in Vanessa Redgrave and Lesley Manville, because apparently award-winning actresses occasionally want to shoot zombies instead of performing Shakespeare. Their presence elevates the material without gentrifying it—they understand that Cold Storage is meant to be fun, not a meditation on mortality.
Make-up geniuses Dave and Lou Elsey create creatures that manage to be both disgusting and strangely beautiful, the fungal infections progressing through stages that make you want to look away while simultaneously leaning closer to see the details. The film pairs these visual grotesqueries with apt needle-drops—The Beach Boys’ “I Get Around” and Blondie’s “One Way Or Another” accompany montages of the fungus doing its thing, creating a dissonance between the upbeat music and the body horror that somehow works perfectly.
What distinguishes Cold Storage from typical B-movie fare is its cynical wit about bureaucracy. The film understands that in a world of government cutbacks and privatized essential services, the people responsible for saving humanity are underpaid, uninsured, and definitely not trained for this. When the alarm goes off, the current administration has no interest in bothering with a potential plague—leaving the fate of the world to misfits who just wanted to finish their shifts and go home.
It’s clever, funny, suspenseful, and appropriately infectious in its enthusiasm. The cast clearly had a blast making it, and that energy transfers to the audience. By the time the credits roll, you’ll never look at that weird mold in your fridge the same way again.
Contain the outbreak—see Cold Storage in theaters and watch Joe Keery and Liam Neeson battle the fungal apocalypse you never knew to fear.
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