Even accounting for the time Joe Keery fed his rideshare passengers to slavering junkyard dogs, the actor’s “aw shucks” lovability is constitutional to his screen persona. The assembly of guileless young men he’s played since breaking out in 2016 with Stranger Things give his career a strong throughline, leading up to his role in Jonny Campbell’s Cold Storage. It should be neither a surprise nor a disappointment that Keery’s character here is a Golden Retriever in an industrial work shirt. That’s what we’re here for—as well as pandemic-influenced gross-out horror, where the most squeamish person in the audience will only puke half as much as the characters and wildlife on screen.
At face value, Cold Storage feels three years too late to the party. COVID zombie movies and isolated dramas have been fixtures for half a decade. Right now, horror’s chief fixations include male carnal predation (a la Nosferatu, though one could make its case as a COVID allegory, too), bodily autonomy (Shelby Oaks, Companion), and mortality’s cruel vagaries (Final Destination Bloodlines, The Monkey). Viral horror is a tertiary concern at best. But if public health researchers have their eyes glued to the horizon for the next pandemic, then Cold Storage argues that horror should, too.
The story opens 18 years in the past, with government operatives Robert Quinn (Liam Neeson) and Trinny Romano (Lesley Manville) arriving in Australia to aid Hero Martins (Sosie Bacon), a doctor called to the region by the threat of bacterial peril: A space-faring vessel has crash-landed to Earth and carries with it a particularly nasty fungal parasite capable of mind-controlling its hosts, The Last Of Us style. Quinn and Romano manage to contain it, ship it to the United States, and store it far underground in a military bunker that, over the next decade, falls into disuse and is remade as a self-storage facility, where paying customers unknowingly lock away their private assets next to national secrets.
Enter Keery. As Travis, a lowly and lonely employee of said facility, he’s a schlemiel: not the person who spills the soup at dinner, but the one whose lap the soup falls on. He’s a nice guy, just unlucky. His unctuous boss, Griffin (Gavin Spokes), brings on a new hire, Naomi (Georgina Campbell), which lifts Travis’ spirits, especially as they start to hit it off. But a bummer development lies in store: The fungus is among us, having burst out of captivity and oozed its way above ground. Cats. Deer. Rats. Naomi’s unstable ex-husband, Mike (Aaron Heffernan). No one’s safe from the fungus’ influence, and the viewer isn’t safe from the goopy misadventures that follow its escape.
It’s hard to imagine Cold Storage without Keery, not because no other actor alive could’ve played Travis, but because David Koepp’s script seems to be informed by the star’s involvement. His chemistry with Campbell, another gleaming gem in the contemporary crop of horror actors, lends itself to organic chuckles, the kind you get from a meet-cute in a space as unlikely as a self-storage warehouse that happens to house zombifying goo. But Koepp’s more overt punchlines tend to hinge on Travis’ nervous, naive energy, which Quinn (back to help) receives as an invitation to growl at him to shut up. The jokes work—this is another reminder after The Naked Gun that Neeson has terrific comic timing—but mostly because of Keery’s chipperness.
But the stars provide the film’s best effects. It’s no crime to rely on CGI in a splattery monster flick like Cold Storage. Certain sequences even require it. But back in 2006, James Gunn’s emetic Slither benefited from its extensive use of puppetry and prosthetics, so Jonny Campbell’s overwhelming preference for digital visuals 20 years later is a disappointment. Like the gags, the effects work well enough, and are happily offset by the story’s tone, fully entrenched in silly splatter-fest territory after a tense and decidedly more grounded opening, as if Campbell and Koepp intend to bridge the gap between Wolfgang Petersen’s Outbreak and Ivan Reitman’s Evolution.
That Cold Storage hews closer to comedy doesn’t lessen the unnerving sensation of watching its horror unfold. Funny as the film is, the speed with which a biological agent can spread—when the powers that be find the very notion laughable—still makes one squirm in their seat. Ultimately, this is a story about a national dereliction of duty, and how easily authority brushes off genuine threats to that security as nonsense; the fungus is the monster, but military leadership (represented by Richard Brake, luxuriating in full asshole mode) is the villain. What a joy to see both toppled by an unassuming nice guy.
Director: Jonny Campbell
Writer: David Koepp
Starring: Joe Keery, Georgina Campbell, Liam Neeson, Lesley Manville, Gavin Spokes, Aaron Heffernan, Elloria Torchia, Richard Brake, Sosie Bacon
Release Date: February 13, 2026
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