While there are several very useful and flavorful fungi in our wonderful world, the gnarly green tendrilly stuff unleashed on humanity in the new somewhat-comic thriller “Cold Storage” is definitively unfriendly. The “What If?” narrative proposition powering this movie, directed by Jonny Campbell and adapted from David Koepp’s 2019 novel, is based on a real-life event.
That is, the breakup and descent of the NASA space station Skylab in 1979, and the space agency’s diligent recovery of the erstwhile orbiter’s debris. Beginning in Western Australia, the movie depicts an uncollected piece of debris emitting the aforementioned gnarly, green, tendrilly fungus, which almost instantly infects all the humans in the immediate vicinity and causes their bodies to explode. This all looks pretty much as yucky as it sounds.
The eerie sun-parched quiet in the aftermath calls to the cinephile’s mind the classic 1971 space contagion picture “The Andromeda Strain,” adapted from the 1969 best-selling novel by Michael Crichton. This is no accident. But that’s not to say “Cold Storage” is derivative. Like Crichton before him, screenwriter Koepp has a firm grasp of actual science. Not to mention a sometimes cheeky way of reminding you of that—one on-screen text during the Skylab prologue reads “Pay Attention. This shit is real.”
After a small NASA contingent (led by Liam Neeson and Lesley Manville) manages to trap, freeze, and contain the rampaging green stuff, we cut to the government warehouse where the fungus lies dormant in, yes, cold storage. Only the government warehouse is shut down, the building goes up for sale, and decades later, in the present day, it’s a self-storage emporium. Being overseen, in a manner of speaking, by a couple of Zoomers, Joe Keery as lackadaisical Travis “Tea Cake” Meacham and Georgina Campbell as the much more focused and alert newbie Naomi. (Both actors are vets of prestige TV and film sci-fi/horror, Keery via “Stranger Things,” Campbell in the likes of “Black Mirror” and “Barbarian.”)
Neither is enamored of their security guard gigs. We first see Tea Cake, who assures Naomi and the audience that his nickname isn’t what it seems, engrossed in Jack Finney’s novel The Body Snatchers. Well, he ain’t seen nothing yet. A couple of semi-ordinary points of intrigue come up. Vanessa Redgrave plays a very old woman who wants to examine her own container. The presumption is of a sentimental journey, but once she’s inside, she gets out a hefty pistol. Then there’s the muscle car (one of two, it happens) driven by an irritated fellow—Naomi’s spurned former boyfriend, it so happens. He’s here to make trouble. He himself doesn’t actually know how much trouble. Except there’s some of the aforementioned fungus now infesting the parking lot after a breach, and it can get into a person by burrowing, say, through the heel of his shoe, and then…
“Cold Storage” strikes a nifty balance between the sardonic and the stressful and throws a lot of gnarly gore and gook into the scenario, as a bargain. Neeson and Manville’s characters get pulled out of whatever retirement they might have been contemplating to try and fix things, while Naomi and Tea Cake frantically flee from the creeping fungus. Said fungus demonstrates a variety of powers, culminating in one instance in the reanimation of a dead deer that’s now imbued with sufficient intelligence to operate a freight elevator. A posse of bikers—shades of “Dawn of the Dead”—led by a rogue security guard, make an attempt to rob the storage facility and end up fungusized. Horror film vet Richard Brake brings his high cheekbones and beady-eyed glare to a meaty role as an old nemesis of Neeson’s character. The twists are abundant, and while some seem to come out of nowhere, if you pay enough attention, you can delight in how deftly Koepp sets them up.
