You may feel a strange sensation after watching Simon Glassman’s first feature-length movie, Buffet Infinity. Don’t worry. It’s only your frontal lobe dissolving and dripping through your nostrils onto your bemused and anxious face.
Buffet Infinity, a selection of the 2025 Fantasia International Film Festival, defies both simple progressive and transgressive labels. It is sci-fi, comedy, and bleak cosmic horror, brilliantly stitched together from hundreds of fictional local news reports and commercials. Buffet Infinity is a public access cable pastiche, a VHS patchwork of weirdness that slowly reveals its story through confusing visual artifacts and seemingly amateurish editing.
It starts, as all classic stories do, with a sinkhole that appears in the parking lot of a strip mall. Inside the shopping center are a pet-sitting service and Jenny’s Sandwhich Shop (intentionally misspelled, as are many graphics in the movie). There’s also an all-you-can-eat joint called Buffet Infinity, which promises patrons anything they could dream of devouring at a reasonably low price. Seemingly as hungry for space as its customers are for yummy treats, Buffet Infinity keeps expanding, taking up more and more physical space, growing like sourdough starter that has spilled over the sides of its jar.
Meanwhile, societal apocalypse is on its way to Alberta, as predicted by the mystic and popular recording artist, Langdon P. Hershey. An ambulance chasing attorney, an insurance lawyer, a used car salesman, and the staff of Ahmed’s Pawnshop create odd advertisements that comment on the action in the movie. Newscasts report on the strange events without shedding any light on the issues. There’s something weird going on in Alberta and somehow, connected to it all, is the capital of convenience known as Buffet Infinity.
Writer/director Glassman employs a style of storytelling that is almost subliminal. Overlapping dialogue seems to be at odds with itself, spewing differing points of view simultaneously while using the same neutral delivery. Bad VHS tracking infests the visuals, making some details impossible to see. Buffet Infinity is a puzzle, baffling and hilarious, practically daring the audience to keep watching.
That can be a chore. My capacity for extreme sensations is pretty high, but Buffet Infinity gave me a brutal headache. White noise and low frequencies battle in an aural tug of war for the viewer’s sanity. If that was Glassman’s intention, then he succeeded gloriously. Viewers with sound sensitivities may have a difficult time enjoying Buffet Infinity. Others may find that the video and audio gimmicks get a bit long in the tooth.
But if you can hang with it, and I strongly encourage you to make the attempt, you will be rewarded with the most brilliant, hilarious, and unsettling film of the decade so far. Buffet Infinity is surreal, sometimes absurd, and often splintered. But, like watching a broken mirror reassemble itself, Buffet Infinity brings all of its shards together into a darkly shining film. As soon as Buffet Infinity ended, I wanted to watch it again because I knew, I just knew, that I could find something else in the crazed images that I had missed during the first viewing. Trust me when I say I will rewatch Buffet Infinity as soon as I can legally get my grubby mitts on it.
Interpret Buffet Infinity however you wish. Whether you think the movie is a pointed criticism of the backstabbing world of local business, an essay on gluttony and greed, a comedy about the fears of the citizens in a small town, or the chronicle of a horror creeping into our dimension from Somewhere Else, you’re right. Like the titular restaurant, Buffet Infinity offers so much more than you’re ready for.
Buffet Infinity premiered at the Fantasia International Film Festival in Montreal on Monday, July 28. The Festival runs from July 16 to August 6 in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. Writer/director Simon Glassman received a Special Jury Mention from the Northern Excellence competition for Best Canadian Filmmaker 2025. You can find ticket and lineup information at the official website here, and stay tuned to Biff Bam Pop! for our coverage!
