Found footage is a hit or miss genre.
It’s really easy to make, but it’s also really easy to make poorly.
Even when you do it well, it’s still not everyone’s cup of tea.
Infirmary isn’t a bad found footage horror film, but it’s also far from the best I’ve seen.
It definitely gets style points for getting the location it was shot in. That goes a long way to making the ambiance just super creepy all on its own. After all, there’s not much more that’ll induce some dread than a big, empty hospital-type building. Doubly-so when you get the little bits of backstory about it throughout the film.
The biggest challenge any found footage film has is making it believable that the footage fits within the constraints of the cameras you lay out in the narrative. In this case, you’ve got security cameras in a bunch of hallways and large rooms, which makes perfect sense in general. Then you’ve got two security guards who, for whatever reason, need to wear bodycams.
Even with all those in place, I’m pretty sure there are more than a few “cheat” shots… where you can’t really tell what camera would have been able to catch just that particular scene. This especially becomes an issue when we (suddenly) discover that that bodycams have a full IR night vision mode in the last 20 minutes or so of the film.
Like most found-footage films, things unfurl slowly over time until just being wild in the last bit of the film. The problem here is, there’s not a whole lot else at all that goes on. We have our main character (Ed), the senior security guard (Lester), and the administrator (Ms. Downey, who’s apparently working very late for some reason). There’s never more than two of the on the screen at any given time and, most of the time, it’s just Ed or Lester.
That kind of limits anything else that can be done to really hold interest or expand on anything.
It doesn’t help that neither Ed or Lester are what I’d call “compelling” characters. There are some hints of interesting back story for each of them, but because there’s no good way to bring it out, the only people who know it are those who made the film.
So, unless you really lock in to the whole “creepy setting” vibe, it’s really easy to just get bored long before things get exciting.
And when things do get exciting… they’re over pretty quickly. The good news is they do pay off a bunch of breadcrumbs they dropped along the way, so the writing isn’t awful when it comes to that. But it does wrap up pretty quickly with just a few more jump scares and the (apparently requisite in found footage films) utterly bizarre bit.
Overall, I’d say this is only worth checking out if you really like found footage stuff or creepy hospital vibes in your movies. I don’t think there’s much here that’s going to stick with you that you couldn’t also got from any number of other films… or, y’know, just walking around an empty building on your own some night.
- Infirmary – October 19, 2026
- Tragedy Girls – October 18, 2026
- Crystal Lake – October 17, 2026
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