Director: Simon Glassman
Writer: Simon Glassman
Stars: Kevin Singh, Ahmed Ahmed, Brandon Vanderwall
Synopsis: Echoing the Canadian comedy classic SCTV, crosscutting between original, low-budget TV ads to tell the sinister tale of two restaurants battling it out in the fictional town of Westridge County.
There’s a gaudy, artistic scrappiness to a great local business commercial. Most of us who have cut the cable cord, only to be sucked into the far more expensive streaming web, don’t get to marvel at these unique nuggets of regional advertisements anymore. They pop up every once in a while in places you don’t expect, but their ubiquity is no longer a part of our lives. Building a narrative around these strange and wonderful pieces of culture is something that could be a tough sell now as their relevance has passed, but what comes out of Buffet Infinity is nothing short of astonishing.
The plot for Buffet Infinity is something you catch in between what’s playing in front of our eyes. Written by Simon Glassman with story credits going to Allison Bench and Elisia Snyder, the plot worms its way into your consciousness through snippets of a combination of advertisements, news reports, and PSAs. You barely realize how layered the characters and the action happening outside the world of these snippets is before the depth of the piece pulls you under and cracks open your ideas of perception. Buffet Infinity could have easily been as funny and enjoyable as just a pair of rival restaurants competing for the hearts and minds of a small Canadian town, but the film becomes so much more than that.
This film will be open to interpretation. For those of us who won’t stop thinking about it after we see it, Buffet Infinity will become something of a gauge for the mood of the masses. Just beyond the surface is the idea of how a corporation, or in the case of Buffet Infinity, an entity, can manifest a novelty around itself to belie its true nature. Both with businesses and otherworldly entities to take all it can from us and then toss us away for the next consumer. The restaurant Buffet Infinity’s resources seem infinite and its ability to undercut the small, local businesses it competes with is relentless. There are dozens of parallels within our world. Add to this the ideas of religion, conformity, culture wars, nature vs. nurture, and the burden of capitalism wrapped too tightly around humanity’s neck and this strange, beautiful, horrifying conglomeration of a film moves beyond jokes and oddity into something that may reveal a truth to the viewer.
Truth is important to a film like this and the actors are central to that idea of bringing a truth to this strange story and these strange characters. Kevin Singh is absolutely perfect and deadpan as lawyer Mosley Rosin. Though, Ahmed Ahmed as Ahmed is something else entirely. His earnestness throughout the strangeness, tailoring ads for his pawn shop to the weirdest happenings, is enchanting. It isn’t until the end that the veil falls from Ahmed’s eyes, but even then he’s still attempting to sell his wares, promote his business and ignore the apocalypse. Ahmed Ahmed imbues Ahmed with the spirit of a scrappy and savvy business owner.
It will be hard for some to get to some sort of truth if they see footage or just read a synopsis of Buffet Infinity. It’s likely to be dismissed as a mere “stoner” film. There will be those who sit through the funniest bits, which morph into nightmare fuel and be turned off by what they have experienced. Yet, it’s clear that the filmmakers were thoughtful and contemplative in their dissection of culture. Buffet Infinity is not for those who can’t give it their full attention, but it is for those who are open to a mind altering phantasmagoria with a sheen of what it was once like to consume television and to think you saw something that just wasn’t quite right in those ads.
