TL;DR – While filled with fascinating concepts, it becomes a film that is less than the sum of its parts.

Post-Credit Scene – There is no post-credit scene.

Disclosure – I paid to watch this film.

Warning – Contains scenes which may cause distress.

Cold Storage Review Introduction –

If you have been on our site before, you know that we are here for an interesting new Zombie work. While the genre can be overstuffed at times, the good films use the zombies as a reflection on society and have interesting things to say. Today, we are looking at a film that is filled to the brim with interesting concepts, but struggles to make a great film out of it, despite all the building blocks being there.  

So, to set the scene, when Skylab crashed into Western Australia in 1979, NASA thought it had collected all the debris, but it missed one. It housed a fungus they were experimenting on, but what went up was not what came down. Luckily, the canister landed in the barren Australian desert, though unlucky for the small township that needed to be napalmed to contain the spread. A small sample was kept in the top-secret Atchison Storage Facility in Kansas. But time is a fool to us all, and decades later, what was stored on sub-level 4 was forgotten, the facility was sold off to a self-storage company, and life went on. Well, it did right up until an internal warning system that has not been activated since the Cold War started blaring in Washington.  

Good Ideas

Conceptually, Cold Storage is a film stuffed to the gills with fascinating ideas. The American government forgot that it stored a zombie virus in a top-secret facility, only to sell it for storage? Fascinating. A fungus gets mutated in space and comes back as lethal. Fantastic. Criminals pulling a heist, only to find themselves in a horror film? Engaging. Old government agents being pulled out of retirement to clean up a mess they left all those years ago? Solid. A fungus manipulating the sad little man into hunting down his ex-partner to spread the disease? Bold. Naomi (Georgina Campbell) and Teacake (Joe Keery) are pulling the night shift when a beeping alarm reveals a hidden control panel, and reveals that the building they are working in had a dark past? Intriguing. A suicidal woman on her anniversary, finding the will to live through the medium of killing the undead? Sign me up. The cast is clearly here for it, because they look like they are having fun. With Georgina Campbell & Joe Keery having great chemistry. Indeed, each of these could have been an interesting film in their own right, and should have worked here, but unfortunately, they don’t coalesce together.

Execution

Cold Storage is full of good ideas, but the result is a plodding zombie film that never reaches the promise it’s grasping for. While the prosthetics crew and the artists who brought the digital animals to life, or death in this case, have put a lot of work into this. You can tell they are banking on their audience having some level of understanding of fungus-based-zombies from The Last of Us. This extends to the soundscape they use and the way they move. Some storylines come out of nowhere, interesting narrative arcs fizzle out, and coincidence is the name of the game. A good example of this is that I wrote in my notes as to ‘how did the cat get infected at the start?’, and when the film revealed this, it asked profoundly many more questions than it answered, leaving the revelation to fall flat. Or Liam Neeson’s back issues which work well on paper, but not in execution. It is played as comedic, but then all the stakes are presented as a drama bringing tonal inconsistencies. All these issues were not helped by intensely inconsistent pacing and an ending that dragged on.   

Recommendation

In the end, do we recommend Cold Storage? Look, it is not a bad film. It has some fascinating moments. It is just that you can see all of its potential, and how it is not using it at all, leaving you more frustrated at the missed opportunities than anything else. Have you watched Cold Storage? Let us know what you thought in the comments below.If you liked Cold Storage, we would recommend All of Us Are Dead to you because it is also trying to pull off something interesting in the Zombie space.  

By Brian MacNamara: You can follow Brian on Bluesky at @Tldrmovrev, when he’s not chatting about Movies and TV, he’ll be talking about International Relations, or the Solar System.

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Credits – All images were created by the cast, crew, and production companies of Cold Storage
Directed by –     Jonny Campbell
Screenplay by – David Koepp
Based on – Cold Storage by David Koepp
Music by – Mathieu Lamboley
Cinematography by – Tony Slater Ling
Edited by – Billy Sneddon
Production/Distribution Companies – Pariah, Canal+, Samuel Goldwyn Films & StudioCanal
Starring – Georgina Campbell, Joe Keery, Liam Neeson, Vanessa Redgrave, & Lesley Manville
With – Sosie Bacon, Richard Brake, Aaron Heffernan, Ellora Torchia, Rob Collins, Justin Salinger, Gavin Spokes, Andrew Brooke, Darrell D’Silva, Lujza Richter, Nahel Tzegai, & Daniel Rigby    
Rating – Australia: MA15+; Canada: 14A; Germany: na; New Zealand: R; United Kingdom: 15; United States: R