Infirmary had its world première at Dances With Films NYC, 16 Jan January 2026
Infirmary knows exactly what it is, and right from the outset wants the viewer to know too. For in opening with text about an “unknown disturbance” at LA’s Wilshire Infirmary which left two dead and one missing, and in promising to reveal “recovered footage” recorded at the scene, Nicholas Pineda’s feature debut is telling us that it is found footage and that, like Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez’s The Blair Witch Project (1999) and the countless films that it inspired, this will document, via intradiegetic camerawork, the last known steps of characters (at least some of) whose doom is already sealed.
This is all familiar territory, as is the location of the title, an abandoned hospital whose eerily empty hallways were once home to psychiatric patients and their unconventional, inhumane treatments. For this kind of setting is well known from Tony Randel’s Hellbound: Hellraiser II (1988), Brad Anderson’s Session 9 (2001), Marcel Sarmiento and Gadi Harel’s Deadgirl (2008) and Colin Minihan and Stuart Ortiz’s Grave Encounters (2011) and Grave Encounters 2 (2012) – those last two also being found footage – while the fact that the building has been mothballed and is being manned by a skeleton staff before its final closure also recalls the police station of Anthony DiBlasi’s Last Shift (2014) and his remake Malum (2023). As a Marine sniper who went to a war zone but never got to fire a single shot, Infirmary‘s protagonist Edward (Paul Syre) lifts his backstory straight out of Sam Mendes’ Jarhead (2005). Even the stated date for this long dark night of the soul, 23 March 2023, seems to be invoking the so-called 23 enigma.
Yet even as Katy Krauland’s screenplay accommodates all manner of horror clichés, it also layers them in such a way as to confound our expectations until we become, like Edward, all too lost in the labyrinthine corridors of its unfolding narrative. For as softly spoken Edward works his first night shift as a security guard at the Wilshire alongside his older, lazy, bullying boss Lester (Mark Anthony Williams) and sweet old administrator Ms. Downey (Danielle Kennedy), he becomes ever more paranoid that there is someone else with them in the building, all amid strange noises off, flickering and eventually failing lights, and things definitely going bump in the night.
All this is shot on the infirmary’s many CCTV cameras, which afford Resident Evil-style high angles with an unnerving cant to them (and with the occasional zoom, as though to suggest that someone else is monitoring and fashioning the footage live into spectacle), and on the mobile bodycams that Edward and Lester are required to wear at all times. There is also a disturbing electronic score from Stephan Bolch aka Theatre of Delays, itself an aberrant encroachment upon what is supposed to be raw footage “presented”, as the opening text declares, “in its original and uncensored form”.
The growing confusion and panic of Edward modulate our own, as an initially simple three-way setup gradually turns into something more complicated and deliriously overdetermined. On the one hand, Edward’s colleagues are messing with him and actively trying to scare him, while on the other hand there really is an intruder (Corinna Wagner-Smith) prowling the interiors. At the same time, this hospital comes with a horrific history of unspeakable experiments, and has a chapel full of extremely creepy mannequins (like the life-sized clown dolls in Stephen Magnetti’s 2015 found footage Hell House LLC) that will soon start appearing in other parts of the building, as though an incursion of a more supernatural kind were underway. And then there is the psychological subtext (in a one-time ’loony bin’), as both ex-cop Lester and ex-soldier Edward seem to have left their jobs under something of a cloud, and prove highly evasive when questioned about their own pasts, while Ms. Downey, with her weird stares, is even more enigmatic. There seems to be more than one thing hidden in these interiors, just waiting to come out, as the repressed longs to return.
Edward is a “momma’s boy”, although whether that makes him a childlike innocent, or something more akin to Norman Bates, remains unclear. At the very least, though, he is suffering a kind of PTSD, and in his alone time reenacts upsetting military encounters. Edward likes to shadowbox – and in these shadows, invisible enemies, both external and internal, lurk all around. Is Edward himself a patient of the infirmary oblivious to his own madness? a lost soul killed in the Middle East and unaware that he is a dead man walking in limbo? an unstable veteran triggered into killing? or just a young man caught in a haunted, irrational place? In raising all of these questions without every quite answering them, Infirmary has us, like its characters, going around in circles seeking a (re)solution that we also dread finding. And while the film features a lot of meandering ambles along endless halls, these all take place in a cloying, claustrophobic set that brings all the uncanny production value a genre fan needs, especially when lit only by torchlight. By the end, the viewer will not, after all, be so sure what they have just watched or exactly what this is.
strap: Nicholas Pineda’s found-footage debut feature confounds psychological and supernatural in the shadows of an abandoned hospital
© Anton Bitel
