I’d rather stare at my ceiling and watch the fan go round and round than sit through a horror movie that doesn’t even try hard enough to scare me. Found footage horrors aren’t exactly the easiest films to make, but when you have an entire hospital as your playground, filled with enough creepy, damp and dingy corners to set the mood, the audience can’t really be blamed for expecting more than an hour and a half of mindless set-up, waiting for something spooky to happen, only to left empty handed in the end. Nicholas Pineda’s “Infirmary” is a snoozefest through and through, and at times, it feels like the director is actively testing our attention spans after we’ve spent years destroying it while doomscrolling. Pineda’s film gives us a few pointless little clues about the protagonist’s real identity that are weirder than Matt Damon trying to do the six seven gesture at the ripe old age of 56. I honestly have nothing nice to say about the film, so if the makers happen to read this explainer, I hope you guys put some heart into your next project.
What happens in the film?
“Infirmary” opens with a title card which says that on March 23, 2023, when authorities responded to an unknown disturbance call from the Wilshire infirmary, and upon responding, they found two dead people. The authorities are looking for a person of interest related to the deaths, and the following footage is meant to tell us more about how everything unfolded that night. A young guy named Edward, who’s supposedly an ex-marine, starts his new job at the Wilshire infirmary as a security guard. Edward meets Lester, the other guard who’s been working here for almost ten years, after he retired from his job as a cop. Lester isn’t happy to see such a thin and frail guy as his new partner, so he refuses to address Edward by his full name, opting to call him Ed instead. After this awkward interaction with his new boss, Edward heads to meet Ms. Downey, the HR executive who is supposed to help him finish the paperwork. Downey is a middle aged woman who looks like she could definitely be the one haunting these hallways, but she treats Edward nicely, which eases him up a little bit. When she asks Edward to fill out the SF-15 form because she’s hiring a veteran with disabilities, Edward says he doesn’t qualify for it. He never reported his shoulder injury to his commanding officer while he was on duty, and after it worsened following his discharge, the bureaucracy left him in limbo over whether it can be considered an active-duty injury. He also mentions that he joined the army after witnessing the horrors of 9/11 as a kid, and he really wanted to be the one who hunts Bin Laden down. I personally found this whole bit weird and astonishingly stupid. After his conversation with Downey is over, Edward gets spooked by a door which keeps opening by itself, but he then simply moves past it, convincing himself that these doors are old and faulty. He goes back to Lester, who then gives him a short tour of the facility. This infirmary is about to be demolished, but when it was up and running, Mr and Mrs Wilshire experimented on patients struggling with mental health. Lester says the couple probably killed thousands of people through their freaky experiments, and this lore really got my hopes up before the film squashed that very same hope as it progressed.
Do Lester and Edward catch the intruder?
Lester takes Edward to check out the morgue, and he asks the rookie to get into one of the body drawers to prove that he’s cut out for the job. Any normal person would refuse to do this, since the drawers already reek of death and rot, but Edward decides to prove his courage, and Lester accidentally locks him inside. Edward is freaking out, not knowing what to do, and Lester runs away to get the keys to open the door. After looking at his surroundings using the flashlight he had on him, Edward sees a severed head right next to him, and Lester immediately pulls him out. Turns out, it was Lester pranking him with a fake prop he’s named Martha. It was a test which Edward has passed, as Lester claims the last guy left the job after going through this bizarre prank. The next stop is the chapel, where there’s a bunch of medical mannequins kept next to each other. When the two men leave the scene, we see a person wearing a black hoodie emerge from the mannequins. After Lester hands the surveillance system over to Edward and tries to take a nap, Edward notices the same person running through the hallway. When Lester uses the comms to warn the intruder to go away, she breaks one of the CCTV cameras. Edward informs Lester and asks if they can call the cops, which amuses the guard, who’s been working here for a decade, because the cops couldn’t care less about coming down here over an intruder. They start looking for the girl who’s snooping around this abandoned mental hospital for God knows what reason, but Lester stops Edward from going down a particular hallway. The place gives Lester the creeps, especially since he once lost his dog there after it started growling at something before disappearing forever. They hear a loud noise, and Lester assumes the intruder jumped out of the window. Without even checking further, Lester leaves Edward alone and heads back to the security room. Edward starts looking around the washrooms, and soon after, he starts behaving strangely, talking and acting as if he’s still in the army while wandering through the empty cafeteria, which also reeks of its disturbing past. Thankfully, Edward comes back to his senses once Lester scolds him over the radio, and he fixes the broken camera on his way back.
Is Lester dead?
After Edward comes back, Lester spots a figure in the cafeteria, and he thinks it might be the intruder, while Edward feels it’s one of the mannequins they saw earlier. Before the two men can figure out who’s in there, the power goes out, and Lester leaves Edward alone to head to the basement where the breakers are. Edward is scared about the mannequins, so he tries to talk to Lester over the radio. Lester tells him that after Mr. Wilshire died, Mrs. Wilshire became an even bigger freak, ramping up the crazy experiments on people. One day she figured if she could extract the mental illnesses out of her patients and transfer them into the mannequins. To achieve this outrageous goal, Mrs Wilshire started practicing black magic and witchcraft, and she had to disappear once the authorities found out about her experiments. When Lester started working here, he was told that Mrs Wilshire still roams around the facility late at night, and he never questioned his peers if this is a made up story. After Lester goes off the radio to enter the basement, Edward freaks out a bit and heads out. The poor guy finds one of the mannequins right outside the security room, and he feels that Lester is pranking him once again. Instead of leaving the doll alone, Edward decides that he needs to put it back to its place in the middle of a power outage. Edward can’t even lift the mannequin because it’s so heavy, and when he finally manages to drag it to the chapel, he finds it standing upright all of a sudden. I bet he didn’t imagine the mannequin falling on him, which truly freaks him out and he finally decides to run away. Meanwhile, Lester wanders around the basement looking for the breakers, and just as he turns the switch back on, he disappears, and we never see or hear from him again. Edward tries to contact him over the radio, but Lester never responds. Poor Edward then finds a puddle of blood, and when he follows the trail, he discovers a dead dog rotting away. The sight of the dog corpse terrifies him, leaving him frozen in sheer panic.
Is Edward alive or dead?
Edward is gasping for air after coming across the dead dog, which probably belonged to Lester as he was talking about earlier. Before he can calm himself down, Downey approaches him from the darkness, looking like a freaky mannequin herself. She seems concerned about Edward coming across all this trouble on his first day, and since the power is back on, she offers to help him to find Lester. She claims Lester isn’t really a good employee, and he often sneaks into the basement to drink. When Downey heads down the hallway Lester had earlier warned Edward to avoid, Edward is terrified to follow her. She tells Edward that he shouldn’t be trembling when she’s just taking him down to the basement, and she claims this is the only path to go there. While they walk, Downey mentions that the Wilshires used to perform electroshock therapy, lobotomies, and hysterectomies, all of which sound absolutely nuts, but apparently their methods always solved the problem, because you can’t be “crazy” if you’re dead. Edward notices that the lights have turned red, and Downey says something has triggered the emergency lights. When Edward hesitates to head down the basement, Downey straight up calls him a wuss, wondering how he ever made it to the military. As soon as they’re in the basement, they get locked inside, and Downey mentions that there’s no reception or cameras down here. Soon after, Downey mysteriously vanishes without a trace, leaving Edward all alone in the basement, completely baffled by where she went and with no idea how to get out.
Edward comes across a room with old records of the hospital, and he sees a patient file whose face resembles the mannequin he was trying to lift earlier, but hey, that’s just me guessing. He also sees a group picture with the hospital faculty, with Mrs Wilshire sitting right in front. Now, there might not be any connection between this and everything that’s been happening throughout the night, but I can’t help but wonder if Mrs. Wilshire simply changed her identity and became Downey. It would certainly explain Downey’s bizarre fixation with eliminating all forms of mental illness by simply killing the patients. Edward starts getting haunted by different mannequins, before eventually stumbling upon a dead body that looks very similar to Lester. Now I really find it odd that Lester died without any supernatural interference, since the man was clearly resetting the breakers quite often and knew his way around it. I can’t help but think that Lester was somehow trying to shield Edward, or at least trying to keep him safe from the horrors of this mental hospital, because one cannot work here all this time and not notice how the mannequins have life inside them. After seeing Lester’s body, Edward is attacked by more mannequins, and for a while, he tries to fight them in a desperate attempt to save his life. The footage is blurry and full of glitch when Edward is trying to fight something that’s way above his pay grade, and he seriously could’ve used some professional ghostbusters by his side. The footage then cuts to the different places of the facility, and we see the mannequins are back in the chapel after they’re done with Edward. An official document tells us that both Lester and Downey are found dead, but Edward is missing and is now a person of interest. The notification also says that Edward was hiding his real identity, and his identification, as well as the military records he provided were fake. I’m assuming the poor guy just lied on his resume to land a job, but the fact that the mysterious HR, Downey, is also dead, is fishy, since we clearly saw her disappear. Downey didn’t look like someone who was scared of the spirits that haunt this place, and I even think that Mrs Wilshire is Downey, even though she’d be over hundred years old in that case, you cannot rule out that possibility since she was neck deep into black magic. Now, most things about this film don’t make much sense, and all these theories might just be a waste of time, but while we’re here, let’s address the final scene, which shows Edward sitting topless in a chair, his eyes looking utterly lifeless.
I genuinely have no explanation about how the cops found Downey’s dead body, I refuse to believe she ever died. Meanwhile, the fact that Edward got trapped in here only because Downey insisted him to come with her to the basement only indicates that she wanted him down there. If we go back to the morgue scene, Lester mentioned that the last trainee quit when he pranked him with the prop head. We also know the intruder who acts like a red herring in this film, escapes the facility by breaking through a window, at least if we were to believe Lester’s guess. So it’s not entirely impossible to get out of this hellhole if one wants to, and I have to blame the victim, Edward, for not reading the room even once. From putting his hands into the mannequin’s chest cavity which just showed up outside the security room, to messing around the pitch black toilets, he never even considered prioritising his survival. Despite Lester’s warning, he walked down the hallway he wasn’t supposed to, and got bullied to do so by an old woman when he could’ve stood his ground. So Edward genuinely could’ve escaped his eventual fate if he had an ounce of survival instincts, and he’s obviously too stupid to live to see another day. There’s another little detail, related to the parking lot footage, when Edward came into the hospital, there was a white pickup truck alongside his car. In the last scene, there’s only Edward’s car, and the pickup is gone. Now the pickup truck could’ve been Lester’s, the only other person who I believe was alive and thriving in this job somehow, before he got toasted to death. Now, who called the cops or who moved the truck? We’ll never know, and honestly, I’m done scratching my head over this painfully redundant film.
