INFIRMARY is a found footage film about what was seen on the closed-circuit cameras and the body cameras found in a semi abandoned hospital. The film follows two security guards and a woman in the office who are in the hospital when things go down.
Okay, full disclosure. I am not, as a rule, a fan of found footage films. My dislike comes from two places, the first is that things which would never be filmed are filmed or else we’d have ten-minute films (I’m looking at you Cloverfield). The other problem is that almost always the filmmakers break with their conceit in some way because they can’t get to the end without doing so.
And there is also one thing that is occasionally a problem, which is that some time sequences run on a bit longer than they would in a conventional film…I’ll come back to that.
With Infirmary I’m all over the place. There are some truly scary and creepy moments… and there are some moments that just sort of go on or don’t work as well as they should.
The problem with INFIRMARY is that the film takes over half its running time to really start to come together. The problems start early on where the film works to set everyone and everything up. What would be okay in a conventional narrative is hobbled by the film having to unnaturally explain things. We get a couple of conversations that would never happen, or not in the way they are portrayed here. There are a lot of shots of liminal spaces as we see the dark and empty corridors. These sequences are either filler or deeply affecting. Whether the liminal sequences work or not will determine how much of the first half plays for you. For me, some worked, but some didn’t. I didn’t always know why we were seeing as much of the empty halls as we did. Yes, the sequences set a mood, but the narrative doesn’t move much. I was kind of bored. While there are some chills the film doesn’t begin to move until the guards find that there is a person wandering the halls. This spawns some stories and creepy sequences.
As we move into the final half hour the film does pick up. Things get weird and we stop noticing the narrative and technical issues that crop up (what is lit in the CC footage is not in the bodycam, there are a couple of shots that don't fit into the found footage conciet). There are some moments in this final third that do make the hair stand up on our arms. I really liked this final section of the film, even if I don’t think it full makes sense. The trouble is that it's a long trip to get there.
Best for fans of liminal horror and found footage films.
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