A haunted hospital, a bodycam and the problem with knowing exactly where the scare is coming from

There are few locations more obliging to the horror filmmaker than the abandoned psychiatric hospital. Its corridors arrive preloaded with cinematic history: peeling paint, institutional lighting, empty rooms, distant noises and the suggestion that whatever happened here was sufficiently terrible that nobody bothered to clean up afterwards. Add a bodycam, a security guard working the night shift and a mysterious disappearance, and the machinery of contemporary found-footage horror appears to assemble itself almost automatically.

Infirmary knows this machinery intimately.

Perhaps a little too intimately.

Nicholas Pineda’s feature debut takes us into the Wilshire Infirmary, a decaying psychiatric facility whose history is considerably less dormant than the building itself. Edward (Paul Syre Lee) arrives for his first night as a security guard and is partnered with Lester (Mark Anthony Williams), a veteran guard whose abrasive personality suggests that workplace induction has taken a particularly unfortunate turn. Before long, the routine patrol becomes something else entirely, and the footage recovered from Edward’s body camera offers investigators a record of a night that apparently cannot be reconciled with ordinary reality.

It is a perfectly serviceable premise for found footage, and Infirmary immediately demonstrates that it understands the form. The bodycam perspective is complemented by fixed surveillance cameras, giving Pineda multiple visual grammars with which to explore the hospital. We move from the intimate, unstable perspective of the guards to the impersonal geometry of security footage, where corridors become lines disappearing into darkness and rooms become observation chambers in which something may or may not have moved.

The surveillance camera is, after all, one of modern horror’s most useful inventions. It promises knowledge while delivering uncertainty. It tells us that somebody is watching, but never guarantees that the person watching understands what they are seeing.

Infirmary understands that contradiction.

What it struggles to overcome is familiarity.

The film is littered with the conventions that have become almost inseparable from found-footage horror: the institutional setting, unexplained noises, strange figures glimpsed at the edge of the frame, malfunctioning equipment, characters wandering into places they probably shouldn’t and the inevitable suggestion that the camera has captured something the human eye missed.

None of these devices is inherently problematic. Horror is built from recurring forms. The issue is that Infirmary rarely gives them quite enough additional pressure to make them feel newly dangerous.

The film can be atmospheric without necessarily becoming frightening.

That distinction matters.

There is a certain elegance to the visual conception of the hospital. The corridors are oppressive precisely because they are so ordinary. Rather than filling every available corner with grotesquerie, Pineda allows the architecture to do some of the work. The empty institutional spaces become a kind of visual purgatory, their very emptiness creating the expectation that something ought to be there.

And occasionally something is.

But Infirmary repeatedly approaches the threshold of genuine unease only to retreat into the familiar language of the found-footage scare. A noise becomes an event. A shadow becomes a revelation. An empty corridor becomes a runway for anticipation. The film knows precisely how to prepare the audience for a disturbance, but preparation is not the same thing as terror.

The result is a curious paradox: Infirmary can be technically unsettling while remaining emotionally underpowered.

This is particularly noticeable because the central performers give the film more character than its narrative sometimes affords them. Paul Syre Lee’s Edward is positioned as the audience’s principal conduit into this nightmare, while Mark Anthony Williams gives Lester an abrasive, unpredictable energy that complicates the conventional rookie/veteran relationship. Danielle Kennedy’s Ms. Downey adds another layer to the institutional mystery, reinforcing the sense that Edward has entered a workplace where nobody is particularly interested in explaining the rules.

That characterisation is important because the hospital itself is not the only thing being watched.

Edward is being watched too.

The bodycam creates an unusual relationship between character and audience. We are not simply observing Edward’s experience; we are effectively receiving his evidence. The footage is supposed to tell us what happened. Yet the further the film progresses, the less useful that evidence becomes as an explanatory instrument.

That is potentially rich territory.

Found footage works best when the recording device becomes more than a gimmick. The camera should alter our relationship with events. It should make us question whether seeing something actually means understanding it, whether recording violence transforms us into spectators, or whether the supposedly objective camera is simply another unreliable witness.

Infirmary gestures towards these possibilities but doesn’t always push them far enough.

Instead, it sometimes feels like a film walking through the museum of found-footage horror, admiring the exhibits and occasionally switching on the lights.

The psychiatric hospital itself is another familiar piece of genre architecture. From Session 9 to Grave Encounters, abandoned institutions have become almost a subgenre within the haunted-location movie. Infirmary doesn’t radically reinvent that geography. What it does achieve is a certain institutional bleakness: the building feels less like a conventional haunted house than a place whose purpose has become corrupted. It is a workplace, a ruin and a repository for unpleasant memories simultaneously.

That is arguably where the film’s strongest horror lies.

Not necessarily in what haunts the building, but in the idea of institutions retaining the psychological residue of what happened inside them.

The film’s mythology involving patients, experimentation and the possibility of something being transferred from human beings into artificial forms gives the narrative a potentially fascinating thematic dimension. There is an intriguing idea lurking underneath the scares: that madness might not disappear simply because the people who experienced it are gone. It might migrate. It might become embedded in objects, spaces or memories.

That is considerably more disturbing than another shadow disappearing around a corridor.

Unfortunately, Infirmary is not always able to convert that conceptual material into sustained dramatic momentum. The film keeps returning to the familiar rhythms of exploration, discovery and reaction, and eventually the audience can begin to feel the mechanism operating beneath the floorboards.

This is the central weakness of Infirmary: the film rarely surprises us at the level of form.

It is competent at being a found-footage horror film. It understands what the form requires. It knows how to frame an empty corridor, when to hold a shot, how to use surveillance footage and how to create the expectation that something will appear just outside the visible frame.

But horror isn’t merely the art of making an audience expect something frightening.

It is the art of making them uncertain about what frightens them.

And Infirmary too often allows that uncertainty to collapse into anticipation.

The sound design is another significant component of the experience. Electronic textures and sudden sonic disruptions create an appropriately oppressive atmosphere, although the film occasionally leans so heavily on audio cues that the sound begins doing the emotional work the imagery hasn’t quite managed to accomplish. The effect can be less a tightening of the nerves than a reminder that the film would very much like us to be frightened right now.

There are moments when it works.

There are moments when the hospital becomes genuinely uncanny.

And there are stretches where the sheer emptiness of the frame is more effective than any conventional scare could be.

But these moments arrive intermittently rather than accumulating into the sustained psychological assault the premise promises.

That makes Infirmary an interesting example of the current state of found-footage horror. The form has become so established that simply employing its conventions is no longer enough. The audience knows the language. We know the bodycam is going to capture something. We know the surveillance monitor will eventually reveal something that wasn’t there a moment earlier. We know the character will walk towards the noise.

The question is no longer whether the film understands the grammar.

The question is whether it has something new to say with it.

Pineda clearly has an eye for the physical spaces of horror, and there is enough atmosphere and character work here to suggest a filmmaker worth watching. Infirmary is not incompetent filmmaking; quite the opposite. Its problem is almost more frustrating because of that competence. You can see the film that it wants to become flickering within the one that is actually on screen.

A more radical approach to its mythology, a greater willingness to abandon familiar scare rhythms or a deeper interrogation of its surveillance conceit might have transformed its unease into something genuinely destabilising.

Instead, Infirmary walks a well-trodden corridor.

It is just unfortunate that we can usually see where the corridor is going.

The Prognosis:

Infirmary is a technically assured piece of found-footage horror that understands atmosphere, location and the visual grammar of surveillance. Nicholas Pineda makes good use of the decaying hospital environment, while Paul Syre Lee and Mark Anthony Williams give the film a stronger human dimension than its increasingly familiar narrative mechanisms always allow.

But familiarity is the spectre that ultimately haunts Infirmary. The film moves through the conventions of bodycams, surveillance footage, abandoned institutions and unexplained phenomena with relative ease, yet too rarely finds the moment that makes those conventions feel dangerous again.

There is a good horror film buried somewhere inside the Wilshire Infirmary.

The problem is that, for much of the night, Infirmary seems content to patrol the corridors around it.

INFIRMARY premieres exclusively on Shudder and AMC+ on Friday, October 2, 2026.

• Saul Muerte