Director: Jonny Campbell
Writer: David Koepp
Stars: Joe Keery, Georgina Campbell, Liam Neeson
Synopsis: When a highly dangerous fungus escapes from a secret laboratory, a former bioterrorism agent is called back into action. Alongside two young employees, he must confront an invisible and out-of-control threat.
Public storage facilities have become ubiquitous in our human landscape. There seems to be one off every interstate exit and one every ten city blocks. It’s a wonder these monuments of human hoarding haven’t made for fun fictional fodder before. There could be any number of horrifying, terrible things hidden in these units. So it stands to reason that a public storage facility built into the remains of a secret army base would have the most horrible things of all.
The plot of Cold Storage, while requiring a suspension of disbelief, is rather ingenious. A-list screenwriter David Koepp adapted his own novel for the film. It’s intricate, if farfetched, and each piece of the plot fits snugly together. Even the idea that it is farfetched is etched into the script and all possible plot holes you could try and poke at have an explanation, if a silly one. There are strange and funny characters, as well as circumstances that are shockingly ridiculous.
Without a solid cast, though, this script and plot wouldn’t work. The two leads, played by Joe Keery and Georgina Campbell, are charming and funny, but it’s the odd couple of Liam Neeson and Lesley Manville that steal the show. Neeson and Manville play old colleagues who had a hand in originally locking the deadly fungus away. The character’s comfort and knowledge of each other makes for an exciting chemistry. Neeson’s gruff believability mixed with his excellent comedic timing in tandem with Manville’s wild card bravado is a match made in heaven.
Even with this good script and excellent characters, the film relies far too heavily on deus ex machina for moving the plot along. There’s the old woman, Mrs. Rooney (Vanessa Redgrave), whose enigmatic reasons for being in the facility lead to her purpose and then quietly shuffling away from the horror. There’s Mike (Aaron Heffernan), Naomi’s (Campbell) exe, whose reason for being at the facility is even more bizarre. It’s not lazy writing, but it is a shortcut that feels like it moves the story along faster than it should. It could also be that the fungus itself is too powerful and this was the only way to show that. Even if it looks good on screen, this fungus is near unstoppable, which makes for a whopper of an ending.
The visual effects that bring the fungus and several of its hosts to life aren’t flashy, but they really convey how much of a destructive force it can be. The fungus is a lush green and it pulsates when it’s trying to find new hosts or just spreading across a surface. It feels like the filmmakers used CGI to enhance some delightfully gross special effects. The makeup team created some gnarly stages of infection. As fast as the infection and the plot moves, it’s exciting to see that level of detail for something so brief in many instances. Everything is so slimy and crawling, it’s wonderfully icky to watch this goo take hold.
A film like Cold Storage is a pure entertainment vehicle and it really delivers on that. In spite of what the logic center of your brain will say about some of the story elements, the portion of your brain that just wants something funny, gross, and entertaining will get an absolute kick out of this film. It’s worth taking in for the side bits of story alone, like Romano’s (Manville) little back-and-forth with her son as she and Quinn (Neeson) tote something that likely never should have left a military base from the son’s basement. Let the mayhem overtake you and you won’t be disappointed.
