Buffet Infinity has been circulating for a couple of weeks now and the people who have found it are having a hard time shutting up about it. That is where I am coming in. Consider this me adding to the noise, enthusiastically.
The First Thing to Know
Simon Glassman’s film is built entirely out of fake local commercials from Westridge County, Alberta, Canada. That is the whole format. You are watching what appears to be a stack of recordings off a local cable channel from the early 1990s: low-budget spots for businesses that feel one bad month away from closing, public service announcements with a little too much sincerity, news bumpers, the occasional weird interstitial that does not quite make sense. The lighting is wrong in exactly the right ways. The jingle choices are correct and devastating. Every single spot feels like someone cashed in their retirement savings to buy thirty seconds on cable access, and I mean that as the highest possible compliment.
If you grew up anywhere near a television in the 1990s, something in this film is going to reach you in a place you were not expecting to be reached. Glassman has done his homework. He has also, more impressively, done something beyond the homework.
Two Restaurants Enter
The central conflict involves two businesses sharing a shopping center in Westridge County. On one side is Jenny’s Sandwich Shop, a local staple that has been feeding the community for years and has a very clear sense of its own identity. On the other side is the new arrival, Buffet Infinity, an all-you-can-eat operation that is aggressively, cheerfully wrong in ways that are initially hard to name.
The Jenny’s Sandwich Shop arc is the funniest sustained bit of horror-adjacent filmmaking I have sat through in a long time. The commercials for Jenny’s start completely normal and go somewhere I absolutely did not see coming, and then they go somewhere else, and then somewhere else after that.
There is also a sinkhole downtown that keeps getting mentioned in the news bumpers, and a cult leader who has opinions about it, and all of these threads are running simultaneously through a format that does not pause to explain itself. Scene to scene I had no idea what was coming. Not in the chaotic way, not in the shock-for-shock’s-sake way. In the way where someone is so committed to their own internal logic that you just have to stop predicting and start watching. I gave up guessing about twenty minutes in. It was better after that.
The Cast Has No Business Being This Good
The cast is small and every one of them is working at a level this film does not technically require them to reach. Kevin Singh, Claire Theobald, Donovan Workun, Ahmed Ahmed, and Brandon Vanderwall are all playing characters who exist inside a very specific heightened reality, the kind of reality where everyone in a commercial is about fifteen percent too earnest about their product, and none of them blink.
That is harder than it sounds. The temptation in this format is to wink at the audience. These performers understand that the winking would ruin it. They play it straight all the way down, and the film is funnier and stranger and more unsettling because of it.
The WNUF Comparison You Are Going to Make
If you know your analog horror, the comparison that is coming to your mind right now is WNUF Halloween Special. That is the right comparison and I want to address it directly. WNUF, directed by Chris LaMartina, is presented as a VHS recording of a 1987 Halloween news broadcast, commercials included, following a live investigation into a haunted house. It is a specific, loving reproduction of late-80s local television, and its fake commercial breaks are some of the most carefully constructed things in the format. It earned its cult status.
Buffet Infinity is doing something different with similar materials. WNUF is a film about watching television. Buffet Infinity is a film that exists as television, and the distinction matters. Where WNUF uses the format as a frame for a ghost story, Glassman uses it as the story itself. The commercials are not the wrapper. They are the content. The horror and the comedy both live entirely inside the advertising, which means there is no moment where the film steps outside the conceit to remind you something bigger is happening. You have to find it yourself. That is a harder trick to pull and Glassman pulls it.
The other thing worth noting is tone. WNUF is primarily creepy with comedy in the margins. Buffet Infinity is primarily funny with dread in the margins, and the dread is more effective for it. By the time the film earns its unsettling turns, you are already too fond of these characters and this town to find any distance from what is happening to them.
Watch It
Buffet Infinity is on VOD now. Watch it with someone who has not been spoiled. Let them experience the Jenny’s Sandwich Shop arc in real time. Watch their face.
If you have seen everything analog horror has to offer, and you think you know what you are walking into, I am telling you that you do not. This one is different.