Director: Simon Glassman
Stars: Kevin Singh, Allison Bench, Ahmed Ahmed
Dark nostalgia has become something of a trope in the 21st century landscape as an increasing portion of the population has no lived experience of the world before the internet, and through these eyes analog interactions often appear quaint or tinged with unfamiliarity and suspicion. It’s ubiquitous really, from the hazy washed-out polaroid memories imbued in the music of Boards of Canada (currently experiencing a revival) to the watered-down ’80s mulch of streaming hits like Stranger Things. It’s become all too common in modern horror movies, for instance, for characters to stumble across vital exposition on antiquated VHS tapes, as if the (invariably young) stock characters have any experience with those black plastic bricks.
Canadian oddball Simon Glassman goes one further with his wildly experimental feature debut, presenting his entire film like some ungodly, unearthed cassette. But rather than have this manifest like the V/H/S series as a hyperkinetic slog of shaky-cam found footage, his ploy is to stitch together a narrative via a slew of interconnected faux ‘infomercials’, all hailing from the suburb of Westridge. Buffet Infinity has an old recorded-off-the-telly vibe built into its presentation, eye-stinging ghosting effects and strips of fuzzy, degraded ‘tracking’, but it plays with the sensibility of someone ceaselessly switching channels, unable to escape a barrage of tidbits around an increasingly sinister defamation war between two restaurants at a nearby mall (no, really).
Initially it’s easy to come to the miscomprehension that this is a found art piece; collected junk scoured from hundreds of hours spent recording local cable networks or public access television, but quite quickly the persistent uncanny humour tips Glassman’s odiously anarchic patchwork conceit. Harking back to the halcyon days of Adult Swim and it’s Too Many Cooks zenith of macabre absurdity, Buffet Infinity predicates itself on deliberately tone deaf, amateur performances calibrated at such a level as to make one ponder whose drinks have been spiked; the players’ or the viewers’. This dedication to the offbeat instantly assures that Buffet Infinity will have niche appeal. The mercilessly rapidfire attack of the film will further weed out the casual. It’s not unfair to call Glassman’s work migraine-inducing.
But persevere and there’s something sort of marvelous about his uncompromising methodology, weird and juvenile as it is. It initially all seems so random, but once a key set of businesses and their entrepreneurs have been established, Buffet Infinity largely remains with this set cluster, cycling between them like a sketch comedy show as events gradually escalate from the weird to the downright apocalyptic. For a little while the main point of consternation is the questioned validity of restaurateur Jennifer Avery’s (Allison Bench) supposedly Italian heritage, as her independent business is muscled out by the ambitious titular buffet restaurant. But might this also connect to the insistent resurgence of malevolent author/crooner Langdon P. Hershey (Dino Primo)? As the suburb starts emptying out, is Ahmed’s (Ahmed Ahmed) Pawnshop the mall’s last bastion of safety? And what’s with the disquieting apocrypha being relayed in messages against a red background courtesy of the Westridge Society for Religious Freedom? Glassman takes us the long way round to connecting his malevolent dots, filling the dissonance inbetween with, frankly, a lot of bonkers shit.
As much as Buffet Infinity harkens to the darker edges of childhood memories of soft-lit malls, softplay, arcades and all-you-can-eat buffets, smearing them greasy with TV static, there’s something extremely current about Glassman’s methodology, which has the intense hyper-overload feeling of a 90 minute doomscroll. It’s not unlike overdosing on ‘reels’ or TikToks, and seems hardwired into our broad attention-deficient cultural (d)evolution. Watching an hour and a half of this can feel like a marathon, but there are festivals now dedicated to the short sharp dopamine hits of online videos. Curated garishness, clashing colours, brash cutting, multiple voices all crowding for dominance… while Buffet Infinity presents as an analog artefact the modus operandi is actually highly attuned to our digital biospheres. A merciless sludge of miniature encounters for us to Like and Subscribe.
Some elements work better than others. A recurring motif on eating disorders and body shame successfully satirises corporate exploitation of such conditions, but feels both the least rewarding and the most guilty of uninspired eleventh-hour body horror. An obvious route poorly executed. And there are a few sections in the final third where Glassman is moved to briefly abandon his commercials-only manifesto for some more traditional scenes to further some specific ideas. After such a long run in the cathode wash of the channel-hopping boobtube, it feels a little like cheating. In the main, however, this is an intensely realised creation, singular and uncompromising in it’s aesthetics of pure, gluttonous garbage. I can’t tell you how funny it is. That’s a matter of taste. I can tell you I laughed more often than I have at most mainstream comedies of late, and certainly more than I would during any number of popular syndicated US sitcoms.
The Lost Highway Hotel 