Intensity: 🩸🩸🩸 out of 🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸
Directed by Jonny Campbell
What do you get when you combine two BAFTA Award winners, two Oscar nominees, and a TV director — who’s also won a BAFTA — making his sophomore feature film? A fungus-filled, splatterrific, goopy, gory horror-comedy, that’s what. Cold Storage (2026) is B-movie creature feature bliss, and it knows exactly what it is.
Cold Storage: The Players
Georgina Campbell [Influencers (2025)]: Naomi, science-minded single mom getting by with her new gig at the self-storage joint. What could go wrong?
Joe Keery [TV’s Stranger Things (2016–2025)]: Teacake, the “loquacious” parolee who’s desperate to keep his crappy self-storage job. Curiosity’s a harsh mistress.
Liam Neeson [Taken (2008)]: Robert Quinn, retired government agent responsible for containing supremely unpleasant things. He’s not thrilled to be back.
Ellora Torchia [Midsommar (2019)]: Abigail, disillusioned soldier who answered the phone on the wrong day. Or did she?
Lesley Manville [Phantom Thread (2017)]: Trini Romano, Quinn’s just-as-retired partner who’s just as annoyed to be dealing with this crap again.
Cold Storage: The Breakdown
Synopsis
As the saying goes, “You can’t keep a good fungus down.” And if that’s the case, this is the best fungus among us. After hitching a ride to Earth aboard a Skylab remnant and spending decades unceremoniously contained by government agents, it’s finally time for this extraterrestrial visitor to stretch out and enjoy some world domination.
That is, unless two minimum-wage self-storage employees and a couple of forgotten government operatives have anything to say about it. Spoiler: they do. Loudly.
Production
Let’s be honest about Cold Storage (2026) right up front: this is not a low-budget film. StudioCanal fully financed it for around $10 million, but we’re also talking about a practical-effects-heavy project with Liam Neeson on the call sheet. His name still carries weight, even if he’s been riding the what-have-you-done-for-me-lately train in recent years. What that budget does, however, is plant Cold Storage firmly in B-movie territory — and that’s exactly where it thrives.
Director Jonny Campbell delivers a polished-looking film that punches above its weight class. Multiple locations, solid set design, and a mix of practical and CG effects all contribute to a creature feature that feels bigger than its price tag. Beyond that, the sound work is solidly professional throughout — nothing flashy, but nothing that pulls you out of the experience either. The practical effects, as you’d expect from a film this goop-forward, get the lion’s share of the love. The CG is serviceable, occasionally schlocky, but in a movie this self-aware? That’s practically a feature, not a bug.
Cast and Story
Screenwriter David Koepp adapted Cold Storage from his own 2019 novel, so this story was completely fleshed out long before cameras rolled. If you don’t recognize the name, Koepp is the writer behind the Jurassic Park (1993) screenplay, the original Mission: Impossible (1996) story, and most recently the Steven Soderbergh-directed genre film Presence (2024). In other words, he’s no slouch. The script is sharp, funny, and knows when to let its characters breathe between the splatter.
Cold Storage boasts a small cast of heavy hitters, and it pays off handsomely. The less expensive cast members get the most screen time, naturally, but “less expensive” doesn’t mean much when you’re in a B-movie this well-assembled. Georgina Campbell has proven herself time and again, and this project is no different — she’s as capable anchoring a duo-driven film as she is carrying one on her own. Joe Keery, meanwhile, has carved out a niche as the lovable loser who’s surprisingly good under pressure. Not to typecast the guy, but Cold Storage is right in his wheelhouse. Campbell and Keery have genuine chemistry together, and that goes a long way in a film that lives or dies on whether you enjoy spending 99 minutes with its leads.
Then there’s Liam Neeson, who continues his recent trend of embracing the fact that he’s no longer the leading man — and honestly? It shows in the best possible way. Neeson genuinely looks like he’s having a blast on set, and he plays Robert Quinn to the hilt. The fungus should be worried.
Summary
Cold Storage (2026) is a surprisingly solid creature feature backed by a sharp David Koepp script, genuine chemistry between its leads, and some Big Name talent clearly enjoying themselves. It’s goopy, it’s funny, and it knows exactly what shelf it belongs on. Cold Storage is currently available for digital rental and purchase on Prime Video, Apple TV, Fandango at Home, and Google Play. If you’re in the mood for B-movie horror-comedy done right, this fungus is worth catching.
Review by Robert Zilbauer.