BETWEEN A SHOCK AND A GUARD PLACE
INFIRMARY (15)
Director: Nicholas Pineda
Screenplay: Katy Krauland, Nicholas Pineda
Starring: Paul Syre Lee, Mark Anthony Williams, Danielle Kennedy
Running time: 87 minutes
Shudder
Review: RJ Bland
Slasher movies used to occupy the lowest rung of a genre that is often dismissed and looked down upon by the critical community. Horror is base (apparently), and slashers are the lowest of the low. There’s nothing of substance there. Now, whilst us genre fans know that to be complete and utter nonsense, since the early noughties the slasher subgenre has had competition for its position as the most worthless branch of horror: found footage.
The Blair Witch Project kicked things off, but it has arguably always been held up as a revolutionary film and one that, in its own right, is bloody excellent. But since the financial and commercial success of Paranormal Activity in 2009, it feels as though found footage has infested the genre like a plague. There have been some good ones, for sure. But for every Host (2020), there have been a dozen duds (most of which can be found on Amazon Prime!). After a decade or so of countless mockumentaries, handheld horror and about six Paranormal Activity sequels, it felt like the format was finally on its way out. Perhaps we had finally become bored of it.
Pfff. Not a chance.
You see, although there are plenty of crap ones, the fact remains that found footage horror can be bloody effective. The amateur aesthetics, grainy texture and sense of liminality work together to help break down that suspension of disbelief that can be harder to disrupt in glossier, more conventional films. That, combined with the generally low budget required to make them, is why filmmakers keep returning to the format. Infirmary, released on Shudder, is the latest ‘bodycam’ feature to tap into this.
The set up is that what we are about to see is bodycam footage that has been recovered from a crime scene where two people have died and where a person of interest is on the loose. From there we are introduced to Edward, a young guy about to start his first shift on the security team at an old mental hospital called The Wilshere Infirmary (no, I'm not sure why they need this level of security either). Edward is a former Marine attempting to rebuild his life after leaving the military, but his new supervisor, Lester, is hardly the supportive figure he needs during this process of readjustment. An experienced but bitter security guard and former police officer, Lester seems to take an immediate dislike to Edward and goes out of his way to make him feel uncomfortable. Aggressive, petulant and clearly accustomed to being in control, Lester subjects Edward to a particularly unpleasant hazing ritual, locking him inside one of the morgue drawers as a twisted introduction to the job. The only other person seemingly occupying the vast, deserted building is Ms Downey, an unsettling administrator whose strange behaviour does little to reassure Edward. Lester sets Edward up with his bodycam and we then switch between this view and surveillance footage from within the hospital. As Edward begins to patrol the empty corridors, dark rooms and abandoned medical facilities the atmosphere becomes increasingly oppressive. We begin to suspect that the dark secrets and haunting mysteries of this place are about to surface...
There are quite a few tropes that found-footage movies have curated over the years. Stupid protagonists, cheap jump scares, illogical reasons for people still filming, glitches and static. And then there's the one that's a bit more holistic; namely, not much bloody happens for 70 minutes and then it does for the last ten. Not all found footage films are guilty of this of course but it has been a recurring theme in many analog indie features. We get it. There's not much of a budget and you want to backload the scares and set pieces you can afford so we leave feeling like the preceding 70 minutes of tedious characters and monotony has been worth it (by the way, it rarely is). It's a narrative format that Infirmary plumps for - and suffers for too.
But that's not to write it off completely because there are enough positives to possibly make it worth your time. For starters, the concept, whilst pretty run-of-the-mill, is sound and has the potential for some real horror. The fact we don't get as many of those moments as you'd like is indeed a shame but the possibility at least sustains you for a while. Because the setting is genuinely quite creepy. Director Nicholas Pineda manages to conjure up a half decent atmosphere just by having his hapless hero rambling around the eerie labyrinth that is Wilshere Infirmary and by dropping in a couple of suitably unsettling rumours about what used to go on at this hospital (involving medical mannequins!). Aesthetically it's got that dingy yellow-tinged Backroomsy vibe as well, which is all the rage right now and for good reason. It's undeniably effective. A couple of scares in the somewhat effective last ten minutes or so hit the mark too. However, these moments offer meagre rewards for all the plodding that you have to do beforehand. It's not that any of it is terrible, just rather repetitive and somewhat muddled. As is Edward, the central character in all of this. It's not necessarily the fault of the actor himself (Paul Syre Lee), but he's just not very well written and hard to pin down. Also, out of all the weird, supernatural stuff that goes down in this place, him being a former marine is the hardest thing to believe. Infirmary also does that annoying thing of claiming that what we are seeing is found footage but then adding an unexplained score to it. Guys, come on. And whilst the climax cranks things up a notch in terms of tension and dread, the resolution and final image are a bit underwhelming.
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