FrightFest review – Infirmary
There’s a classic Bob Newhart routine based on the observation that whatever prep you have before starting a job will always be useless when on your first day something comes up for which you weren’t briefed – in Newhart’s case, a night guard gets a gig at the Empire State Building and clocks on the evening King Kong climbs the skyscraper. Nicholas Pineda’s found footage feature Infirmary is a ‘first night on the job’ nightmare in which a new night guard has a rough time on his first (and last) shift at a decommissioned-but-not-abandoned mental hospital in Los Angeles.
An opening caption tells us that the upshot of this night will be two corpses and a missing person, then we get a combination of high-angle fixed position security camera views of corridors and rooms and footage from body-cams worn by both guards. The fact that the guards wear cop-like cams is ominous too – this seems like a very dull, low-priority gig … looking after a facility which is due to be torn down, providing security for a place which doesn’t need it any more. Edward Yoon (Paul Syre Lee) is the rookie, who looks like a kid just out of school but is a Marine sniper who’s left the service after an injury he’s vague about which might be more mental than physical – though in a monologue about his time in the military he claims that he never actually got to shoot anyone since the one time he had a Taliban leader in his sights the higher-ups called him off and sent in an airstrike instead. Showing Edward the ropes is Lester (Mark Anthony Williams), an ex-cop who is similarly reluctant to admit why he’s shifted to this dead end career and puffs up his own importance by hectoring, lecturing and hazing the ‘mama’s boy’ … which includes getting him to undergo an initiation challenge of being locked in a morgue drawer with a bogus severed head. Also present, sort of, is administrator Ms Downey (Danielle Kennedy), who isn’t entirely happy with Edward’s paperwork.
A feature of the clutter about the place is a crowd of mannequins used in some sort of psycho-therapy, possibly including unethical or unusual business with murderous experiments and the transference of insanity from living patients to stiff dummies – though this might just be more of Lester’s pile-on-the-new-boy tale-spinning. Pineda hews closely to the found footage template, though the sound design blends with unnerving electronic music to go with the many shots of empty or nearly-empty spaces. Infirmary has something in common with recent horrors like In a Violent Nature or Backrooms – a lot of the film is just Alan Clarke-like images of people walking, seen from behind, with uncertain darkness ahead (Clarke’s Funny Farm, the film in which he hit on this tactic, was also about a mental hospital). Of course, we get a long held shot of a crowd of dummies – then one figure, a vagrant (Corinna Wagner-Smith), detaches from the display and is seen on monitors. But the mythology of transference becomes more important than any intruder or leftover inmate, and the stresses on Edward become more acute as the film wears on.
Folk who don’t care for found footage films often note a lack of actual incident along with seasickness-inducing cinematography – they won’t be persuaded that Infirmary is any different. But Pineda gets good performances and writes interesting characters, holding back and hinting rather than coming out straight and saying things – and when we do get bold statements we’re forced to wonder how true they are. This has a reasonable nugget of plot, but its effectiveness is down to sustained creepiness. Even the fact that we’ve been here before – a ton of films, including Session 9 and the Grave Encounters movies have explored closed-down mental institutions – works for the film, because that’s a characteristic of bad dreams … you find yourself back walking these corridors, looking into these rooms, dodging these phantoms.
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