Infirmary
It’s the first night on the new job for Edward Yoon, at a loose end in his life since discharge from the Marines following an injury while serving in Afghanistan and the complications which arose from it, not least his failure to report the injury to his commanding officer at the time which has led to discrepancies in his paperwork, informed by administrator Ambrosia Downey a reason for his hiring was under disability qualifications.
A night watchman at an abandoned mental hospital, the Wilshire Infirmary, scheduled to be demolished, the power is still running, more or less, and the records of the former patients are still held, Ed questioning his superior, surly ex-cop Lester Wooley, the ethics of reading them, Lester countering that as they are all now dead there is no breach of confidentiality.
The found footage horror explosion having peaked in the wake of The Blair Witch Project and ploughed into the new century with little evidence of merit of self-awareness before mercifully tapering in the last few years with a few notable exceptions, #chadgetstheaxe and Deadstream among them, director Nicholas Pineda’s feature debut Infirmary is not the worst example of the genre, a title likely held by A Night in the Woods, but has little to validate its existence.
Co-written with Katy Krauland and starring Paul Syre, Danielle Kennedy and Mark Anthony Williams as Edward, Ms Downey and Lester, like The Resort the production has managed to secure a location which offers scope and complexity which it utterly fails to capitalise on, the script requiring Ed to wander corridors under tinted neon strips or into the basement by torchlight for ninety minutes while looking increasingly stressed and upset while Lester harasses him.
The inane dialogue minimal other than Lester’s bullying in the name of “hazing” which involves locking the new kid in the morgue for a laugh, and long halls populated only by mannequins and a hazy figure who appears and disappears between camera angles as seen from the control room, the backstory of the Wilshire family and their experiments is given no weight, provided by a man demonstrably unreliable and unrepentant.
Later embellishments of black magic and harvesting of souls compounding the sense that all is nonsense, the unprofessional indiscretions of doddering Ms Downey and Ed’s fabrications on his application confirm that no one can be trusted, but to no purpose when nothing happens and none of the threads tie together into a whole, a trip to the Infirmary perhaps suitable only for treating insomnia, stumbling through decaying spaces insufficient to create drama, character or atmosphere without significantly more engagement.
Infirmary is streaming on Shudder now
