Cold Storage

The Spores of Hubris

There is a distinct, prickly discomfort in watching humanity undone by something as microscopic and unthinking as a fungus. We prefer our cinematic apocalypses to have faces—aliens with grudges, robots with logic, or at least zombies that resemble our neighbors. But in Jonny Campbell’s *Cold Storage* (2026), the adversary has no face, only an appetite. Adapted by David Koepp from his own novel, this film arrives not merely as a creature feature, but as a sardonic, claustrophobic study of the moment when bureaucratic negligence meets biological inevitability. It is a film that asks us to laugh at the end of the world, precisely because the alternative is to scream.

Campbell, a director who has previously navigated the bleak intersections of science and society in television works like *Westworld*, here adopts a visual language that is deceptively mundane. The film’s primary setting—a generic self-storage facility built atop a decommissioned military lab—is rendered in oppressive shades of fluorescent beige and concrete gray. This banality is the film’s greatest weapon. When the chaos begins, the juxtaposition of cosmic horror against the backdrop of discarded furniture and cardboard boxes creates a surreal, almost suffocating dissonance. The camera does not shy away from the grotesque; the practical effects team deserves immense credit for the visceral, tactile nature of the "mutations." Unlike the weightless CGI that plagues modern blockbusters, the body horror here feels wet, heavy, and alarmingly present.



The narrative engine is fueled by a trio of disparate survivors who anchor the film’s erratic tonal shifts. Joe Keery’s Teacake and Georgina Campbell’s Naomi represent a distinct class of protagonist: the underpaid, overqualified, and utterly exhausted millennial workforce. They are not soldiers; they are employees trying to survive a night shift that has spiraled into an extinction event. Their terror is palpable, but it is tempered by a weary resignation that feels distinctly modern.

Into this orbit crashes Liam Neeson as Robert Quinn, a role that functions as a meta-commentary on Neeson’s late-career renaissance as the "man with a particular set of skills." Here, however, the skills are biological containment, and the man is not an unstoppable force, but a relic of a failed system. Neeson plays Quinn with a manic desperation that borders on the comedic, stripping away the stoic veneer to reveal a character terrified by the mess he left behind decades ago.



One cannot discuss *Cold Storage* without addressing the "deer in the elevator" sequence, a moment destined for genre infamy. It serves as the film’s thesis statement: nature does not care about our boundaries, our elevators, or our security protocols. The scene is a masterclass in escalating tension, moving from confusion to abject horror in seconds. It underscores the film's central anxiety—that the barriers we build to keep chaos at bay are as fragile as the drywall of a storage unit.

Ultimately, *Cold Storage* succeeds because it refuses to take its premise too seriously, while treating its characters with absolute sincerity. It lacks the self-importance of elevated horror, opting instead for the kinetic energy of a 1980s midnight movie filtered through a post-pandemic lens. It is a sharp, frantic reminder that while we argue over logistics and budgets, the natural world is waiting, evolving, and occasionally, escaping from the basement.