FANTASIA25 REVIEW: Buffet Infinity [20XX]

Rating: NR | Runtime: 99 minutes
Director(s): Simon Glassman
Writer(s): Simon Glassman

She’s got the sauce!

To truly get an idea of how far writer/director Simon Glassman is willing to go with his unhinged, overlong, and unforgettable Buffet Infinity, look no further than his decision to credit himself as Buffet Infinity. I thought it was another gag where he sprinkled in the title here and there to be caught by anyone willing to keep watching, but then the final frame reveals it’s just … him. He has become the movie. The movie has become Simon Glassman. We haven’t been watching a television or someone else watching a television. We’ve been watching the filmmaker’s mind as it’s being hijacked.

It’s the only explanation I’ve found that allows for the continued devolution of advertisements and news broadcasts to eventually knock down the fourth wall separating the actors from their characters without also knocking down the fourth wall separating them from us. We don’t need to guess when the vantage point shifts (since the continued aspect ratio and tracking noise provides a consistent truth to the fiction) because there’s no television to escape. No, this is a person overwhelmed by propaganda, partisan politics, emotional insufficiency, gluttony, and isolation. A person retreating into the nostalgic comfort of artifice in an attempt to survive their own psychological demise.

Or maybe it was just a TV screen revealing an Alberta town’s rapid decline at the hands of a cosmic horror begat by a science fiction guru’s hubristic desire to become God. If so, its refusal to leave its channel surfing convention behind to delineate between reality and programming renders it impossible to parse. Because I was all-in for the first fifty minutes as local businesses started to throw petty barbs of competitive bile around while also building background alliances with each other. Buffet Infinity’s malicious expansion is the catalyst and the sudden disappearances supply the perfect opening to steal control.

Watching as Jennifer Joy Avery (Allison Bench) subtly denigrates Buffet Infinity to bolster the reasons why people should eat one of her sandwiches (in the same plaza) instead of their smorgasbord before they respond by attacking her like a political opponent was fantastic. So too was the gradual radicalization of Mosley Rosin (Kevin Singh) from personal injury lawyer to corporate stooge. And the reinforced defensiveness of pawn shop broker Ahmed (Ahmed Ahmed) and used car salesman Captain Savings (Brandon Vanderwall) because of their increase in inventory coincides with a missing populace epitomizes today’s straight line between profiteering and waning empathy.

Throw in Langdon Hershey’s (Dino Primo) Scientology-adjacent entrepreneurism setting the stage for indoctrination and a trio of recurring actors hawking dark insurance analogies (Claire Theobald), conformity via mattresses (Siobhan Theobald), and a lack of self-control (Donovan Workun) and the airwaves are literally softening up their viewership to pave the way for whatever force has arrived in the community of Westridge. As such, I kept waiting for the screen to expand and the fuzz to vanish to finally see what this pervasive signal wrought. So, it’s jarring when that reveal arrives within the confines of said airwaves.

Not in the “cool” surreal way, but the “I think they missed a step” way. That’s why I’m going to cling to that credit of Buffet Infinity as Simon Glassman to make it so everything is intentional. That way, I can see all these figures as pieces of a fracturing psyche. Impulses and urges of a mind being pushed and pulled by an unknowable force manifesting itself as imagery Glassman’s mind would deem familiar and safe before eventually turning against him. It’s not a perfect read of the film considering how much of the first half demands an earnest read that Westridge is real and falling victim to a hostile takeover of the senses, but it tips my scales towards the positive rather than negative.

As it should since my experience with Buffet Infinity was positive. Its Adult Swim/”Too Many Cooks” influences are obvious and its desire to dial-up the discomfort as a means of dialing-up the humor is always a plus in my book. Could things have devolved quicker to knock fifteen to twenty minutes from the runtime? Sure. Could the squid/God aspect have been fleshed out more coherently? Maybe, but sometimes the randomness of such “answers” creating additional chaos is better than spelling everything out. This is a uniquely strange and satisfying journey into insanity. Feeling unsure about it is a feature.

One qualm that does remain a sticking point regardless of my read, however, is the pervasiveness of misspellings. At first I thought it was fun because it seemed to only be happening with Buffet Infinity content—an entity pretending to be human and doing it poorly. But then it started showing up elsewhere too. Perhaps a sign of the populace’s cognitive decline (by way of Glassman’s mind) due to the “sound” (Buffet Infinity’s commercial narrator) and our post-capitalist consumerism as social service conditioning? Maybe a product of the “Eight instances of AI use for satirical purposes” stated in the credits?

I’ll chalk it up to being another Easter egg in a film stitched together from a basket overflowing with Easter eggs until some ads and actors start absorbing into each other. I’m certain that when Buffet Infinity becomes available to the general public, someone will break it down in chart form to try and figure out all the references and connections (whether present or imagined) at the back of its manmade evil vs. supernatural evil drama. Others will merely enjoy the fun bits like its never-ending stack of angus beef and wild toppings that’s so beholden to its inability to end that the chef must die before ever finishing it off with its bun topper.