Cold Storage is lo-fi sci-fi done on a decent budget, it’s written by David Koepp, who did the original Jurassic Park the first Mission: Impossible. And it is stacked with actors of the calibre of Lesley Manville, Vanessa Redgrave and Liam Neeson, though none of them is the star. Smartly made, well acted, it’s entirely enjoyable and not very demanding and is the sort of film you might once upon a time have brought home on VHS from the local video shop.
In fact Redgrave is in it so little that I wondered if her presence was some kind of joke. Neeson and Manville get more of a shake, especially in the opening sequence, where they are in hazmat suits as agents sent by Nasa into the Western Australia desert. There, something that came back to earth on Skylab in 1979 has gone rogue and is laying waste to humanity, replicating as it goes.
Being battle-hardened professionals, Quinn (Neeson) and Romano (Manville) know how to deal with situations like this. Soon, not without incident and some splattersome visuals, they have wrangled the virus/organism into some sort of hi-tech flask. The thing is then locked away in – yes – a cold storage facility where it will be quarantined forever.
The years pass. The quarantine facility falls into disrepair and eventually – governments never happier than when outsourcing or privatising – is sold off and turned into the sort of storage facility that members of the public can turn up at to stow a few cardboard boxes. Unbeknown to almost everyone, down in the bowels the organism is still lurking, contained in a temperature-controlled environment behind armoured doors.
This is all preamble. The movie proper takes place over one night from hell, when the two people working the graveyard shift hear an alarm going off in those selfsame bowels and head off to investigate, flirting as they go. Dweeby, insecure Travis and impulsive, sexy Naomi, are played by Joe Keery and Georgina Campbell. I’d watch her in anything but he’s an unknown quantity. Thankfully, for the sake of the film, their chemistry works. Together they are the good-looking, decent couple we want to win through, and possibly fall in love en route.
Working against them, a mad woman (this is the Redgrave strand) who has come to the facility one last time to commit suicide surrounding by reminders of her life with her dead husband. Naomi’s ex and babyfather (Aaron Heffernan), who is furious about something and is a prime candidate for infection. And the storage facility’s manager, Griffin (Gavin Spokes), who arrives in the middle of everything to spirit away some stolen TV sets he’s been storing at the facility. Little does he know…
It is the pile-on plot of a sort that Joe Carnahan might write, though the two-against-adversity vibe is in many respects not unlike Ti West’s moody The Innkeepers.
You want splatter, splatter is what you get. Lots of it. Heads detonate. Whole animals explode. There are innards and gore everywhere. It gets very dumb once director Jonny Campbell expertly brings it up to operating temperature, but quite a lot of fun. The old-school dynamic of rational guy/irrational girl has been flipped – Naomi is scientifically minded; Travis believes in magic and zombies.
And, really, a zombie film is what it is, though David Koepp adeptly weaves in what are clearly concerns about the way the world is heading. Neeson and Manville’s characters – competent, experienced and largely ignored – are institutional memory and public service made flesh. Koepp’s also worried about the commercialisation of everything and, more broadly, the triumph of dumb. In this movie there are really none so blind as will not see, no matter how often they are told.
Cold Storage – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
I am an Amazon affiliate
© Steve Morrissey 2026
