Buffet Infinity is an inventive multimedia mash-up
Buffet Infinity is the kind of movie that restores your faith in truly independent filmmaking. With so much derivative chaff bombarding us at cineplexes and on streaming services, seeing something THIS unique, fresh and experimental is an absolute delight. It’s weird, it’s funny and yes, it’s even legitimately creepy at times. I can’t help but feel like we’ll be looking back on this one as a decade-defining genre movie — even if it might take a good 20 or 30 years before everybody else figures it out.
There’s an obvious gimmick to the film. About 90 percent of Buffet Infinity is comprised of fake commercials — usually running about 30 seconds to two minutes — stitched together and overlapping in carefully selected segments. Yes, it might give you some WNUF Halloween Special vibes at first, but it doesn’t take long before Buffet Infinity becomes its own animal.
This is the kind of movie where even telling you one small thing about the plot kinda’ spoils it. The best possible way to watch Buffet Infinity is completely oblivious to what it’s about, so if you want to catch the best possible experience you might want to think about coming back and reading this review after you’ve watched it. Go ahead, feel free to bookmark this page — we’ll be waiting for you.
Now, assuming you have seen the movie and know what it’s about, let’s get into spoiler territory.
The concept might seem chaotic and hard to follow, but give director and writer Simon Glassman a ton of credit. He actually manages to weave together a solid, gripping and twist-laden plot using just quick-and-to-the-point faux-commercials. There’s a real story going on here and the way the movie unfolds in little minute-long chunks is nothing short of brilliant. It’s one of the first movies I’ve seen that actually rewards you for having a short attention span. Just five minutes in, my phone was down and I couldn’t take my eyes off the screen. It immerses you about as deep as ANY movie that’s come out in the 2020s, and I’m not limiting that to horror films, either.
OK, so the gist of the plot, you might be wondering? Well, it all starts with the titular Buffet Infinity coming to town. Its arrival in a small Alberta, Canada strip mall coincides with a mysterious sinkhole emerging, and before long all sorts of strange and inexplicable things start going down. Pets vanish. Weird sounds start emanating from television sets. And, as you’d imagine, people start disappearing left and right. Huh, do you think the local trans-dimensional cult has anything to do with it?
It sounds like a mess on paper but in execution Buffet Infinity delivers the goods. There are about half a dozen subplots that sorta twist together over the course of the movie. The biggest one is the rivalry between the titular buffet and an old-fashioned, mom and pop sandwich shop in the same strip mall. Their commercials joust one another back and forth and it’s totally hilarious stuff, especially if you grew up in the UHF era and recall seeing real commercials like that in the ‘80s and ‘90s. There’s another airwaves battle pitting a personal injury lawyer against a very Scientology-like organization, plus another subplot about two empty-headed pawn shop employees trying to capitalize on all of the weird goings-on, and yet another one about a guy trying to lose weight in a series of increasingly eerie black and white TV spots. The movie pretty much becomes a pressure cooker, with all of the knotted tensions coming to a quick boil. From there, it falls into more traditional horror movie pacing, with the big question becoming which characters might possibly survive all of this cosmological terror … and which one of them is actually causing it in the first place.
It’s rare to find a contemporary horror flick with this much style and substance. In the hands of a less capable director you’d probably have an aesthetics-heavy horror-comedy that’s light on depth and nuance. But Glassman crafts a truly engaging and riveting story to complement all of the cool visual trickery. Never in a million years did I think I’d ever enjoy fake attack ads about inauthentic “Italian” sauce lawsuits and insurance commercials about people literally killing their husbands in cold blood in a modern day movie, yet here we are.
I’m not sure I’ve seen anything quite like Buffet Infinity before. The way it tells its narrative (and especially the way it makes you digest it, so to speak) is so unusual and without parallel. It’s 30 mini-movies clumped together but in part and in whole it totally makes for a satisfying 90-minute story. It literally stimulates parts of your brain that never get that much of a workout when you’re watching other films. Stanley Kubrick would’ve loved this thing. Salvador Dali, too.
In a film like this a lot of people are going to overlook the cast. And that would be an unwise call because we get like three or four fantastic performances in this movie. Allison Bench as the aggrieved sandwich shop owner, Ahmed Ahmed as the opportunistic pawn shop proprietor, Kevin Singh as the lawyer who seems to know more than he’s “supposed” to … their comedic timing is exquisite and each of them have more than a few bits of LOL dialogue. And when it comes time for things to get dark and freaky, they’re more than up for the thespian challenge.
I’m sure you can read into Buffet Infinity whatever you’d like. Is it a movie about the ills of unfettered capitalism or a warning against the worship of consumerism? Is it a takedown of neo-spiritualist pyramid schemes or a condemnation of inauthenticity in the common Western Canadian’s diet? Perhaps it’s all of these things, perhaps it’s none of these things. All I know is that watching a disembodied hand make an absurdly large and preposterously expensive gourmet burger while criticizing the competition’s condiments is my kind of humor — and watching dudes get possessed by cathode ray tube TV sets and literally turning into walking VCR static demons is my kind of horror.
This is a movie that merges so many of my unrelated niche interest passions into a singularity that I’m starting to wonder if I didn’t black out for a year and secretly write the script myself. I’m a dude who literally watches old commercials to relax, loves taking photos of buffet food in my spare time and can’t help but laugh at small town politics drama. Here’s a horror movie that has all of that, plus some Lovecraftian metaphysical terror thrown into the batter for good measure.
I’d easily lump Buffet Infinity in with stuff like 2024’s Robot Dreams and last year’s Vulcanizadora as a grand titan of offbeat, experimental, genre-defying and expectations-subverting underrated cinema of the ‘20s. For an hour and a half it had me glued to the screen and when it was over, I couldn’t wait to start extolling it to the masses.
All I can say is that if we see ANY film in 2026 more entertaining than this — whether it’s a horror flick or otherwise — we’re in store for a banner year at the movies.
GIVE IT A WATCH IF YOU LIKE: Adult Swim programming, the early V/H/S installments, thrift shopping in general
Director: Simon Glassman
Writer: Simon Glassman (Allison Bench and Elisia Snyder get story editing credits)
Starring: Allison Bench, Ahmed Ahmed, Kevin Singh, Brandon Vanderwall
Studio: Peterson Polaris
Distributor: Yellow Veil Pictures
Language: English
Runtime: 100 Minutes
Release Date: May 08, 2026 (on VOD)
