Hospitals are fucking creepy. I don't care how much money they spend on soothing paint colors, cheerful artwork, or those little signs reminding everyone that healing happens here. Nobody wants to be in one. They smell like disinfectant, bad coffee, and the possibility that somebody is about to tell you something you really don't want to hear. Now abandon one. Better yet, make it an abandoned mental hospital, turn off most of the lights, scatter some mannequins around, and start sending people down hallways that seem to lead absolutely nowhere. Congratulations. You've made a horror movie, and Nicholas Pineda's Infirmary understands immediately that sometimes the best thing a filmmaker can do is find a genuinely creepy place and point a camera at it.
For a while, that's enough. Pineda keeps things small, essentially building the movie around three characters and trusting the abandoned hospital to do most of the heavy lifting. Endless hallways, forgotten rooms, medical debris, and the unsettling suggestion that you could turn a corner and discover something that has been standing there for twenty years create an almost Backrooms quality. Then there are the mannequins, because apparently somebody decided abandoned hospitals weren't creepy enough. Pineda knows how to frame all of this stuff, and the movie is at its best when absolutely nothing is happening. A doorway at the end of a corridor becomes threatening simply because you don't know what's behind it. Sometimes anticipation is considerably scarier than the thing you're anticipating.
The problem is that eventually something actually has to happen. Infirmary has a terrific horror playground but seemingly only a handful of ideas about what to do with it. Characters wander. Something strange happens. They investigate. They wander some more. Another strange thing happens. Repeat until sufficiently spooky. What initially feels deliberate and patient gradually starts feeling like the movie is killing time, which is particularly noticeable because there isn't that much time to kill. A short horror film should move like somebody just discovered the basement door is locked from the other side. Infirmary instead keeps walking back down the same damn hallway.
That's frustrating because there is clearly a good horror filmmaker somewhere inside this thing. Pineda has an eye for unsettling compositions, understands the usefulness of negative space, and doesn't feel compelled to drown every scene in cheap jump scares. Paul Syre, Mark Anthony Williams, and Danielle Kennedy do what they can with characters who are often less interesting than the rooms they're standing in, but the increasingly repetitive structure works against them. By the time the movie finally starts pushing toward its climax, we've spent so long waiting for the other shoe to drop that we're mostly wondering whether somebody left the shoe in another hallway.
By the time Infirmary goes full Blair Doctor Project in its final stretch, with frantic footage and escalating chaos finally taking over, the movie has already spent too much of its brief runtime wandering those same hallways. There are still effective moments, and Pineda's commitment to atmosphere keeps the whole thing watchable even when the story isn't giving him much to work with. That's what makes Infirmary more frustrating than outright bad. The location is terrific, the mannequins are creepy as hell, and Pineda clearly knows how to make an empty corridor feel like somewhere you absolutely shouldn't be. He just doesn't have enough story to keep us trapped there with him. Infirmary starts with a place worth being afraid of and then spends so much time showing it to us that, eventually, we stop being afraid.
Infirmary is now streaming on Shudder.
MPAA Rating: Unrated.
Runtime: 87 mins
Director: Nicholas Pineda
Writer: Katy Krauland; Nicholas Pineda
Cast: Paul Syre Lee; Mark Anthony Williams; Danielle Kennedy
Genre: Found footage horror
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Distributor: Shudder
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Release Date: October 2, 2026
DVD/Blu-ray Release Date:
Synopsis: A guard vanished on his first night at an old psych hospital in 2023. His bodycam footage shows unexplainable incidents that continue to baffle investigators.
