There’s a particular kind of horror film that succeeds not by reinventing the wheel but by spinning it with such confidence and precision that you forget you’ve seen anything like it before. COLD STORAGE is exactly that film. Directed by Jonny Campbell from a screenplay by David Koepp — adapting his own novel — it’s a creature-feature horror comedy that earns every laugh and every shudder, often in the same breath.

It begins in 1979, in the dusty aftermath of Skylab’s crash back to Earth. A piece of debris lands in Western Australia, and with it comes something that has no business being on this planet: a fast-spreading alien fungus that doesn’t wait to be invited in. A tight-lipped NASA team, led by Liam Neeson with cool, coiled intensity alongside the formidably capable Lesley Manville, manages to contain the organism the only way they know how — freeze it, seal it, forget about it. Problem solved. Except, of course, it isn’t.

Decades later, that government containment facility has been repurposed into something far more banal: a self-storage warehouse, the kind of place people dump boxes they’ll never open again. Joe Keery’s Travis “Tea Cake” Meacham is there for the paycheck and not much else, while Georgina Campbell’s Naomi Williams is sharp, grounded, and plainly built for a better situation than this one. When the fungus inevitably escapes — slithering through vents, mutating its hosts in ways that are viscerally wrong — these two become the last line of defence against something the authorities buried and hoped the world would never have to reckon with.

What makes COLD STORAGE work so well is its unwavering commitment to its own absurdity. There is a sequence involving a reanimated cat that somehow manages to be both genuinely disturbing and sharply funny, and it’s emblematic of everything the film does right — the horror and the humour share the same straight face, neither undermining the other. The fungus itself is rendered with practical-looking effects that are vividly unpleasant in the best possible way, the kind of creature design that gets under your skin precisely because it looks like something that could. Vanessa Redgrave and Richard Brake round out the cast in supporting turns that are brilliantly judged, and Neeson and Manville bring the sort of instant, weathered credibility that anchors the wilder elements of the story in something that feels real.