Joel on Film

The purpose of Simon Glassman’s Buffet Infinity is to emulate the experience of flipping between various television news channels—mostly hitting commercial breaks in the process, one supposes—and then to employ something akin to a story in the corners of the frame, in the pauses between canned or scripted dialogue, and in the general entropy of the experience as a whole. It’s a satirical movie in many ways, featuring several big laughs and a whole lot of increasing discomfort about the world around us. It’s also a horror movie for many of the same reasons.

Because of all this, the movie is sort of difficult to review, if only because it’s nearly impossible to quantify or classify. Even the act of labeling it either a satire or an exercise in horror is wholly inaccurate and even irrelevant to the experience of watching it, because we register what’s going on here as neither of those things. It’s merely a bizarre curio, quite unlike anything in the feature-film realm (though it does resemble a few short films from within the last decade—ones involving cooks, a bear and a yule-log fire).

Is it even relevant to synopsize the plot of this, well, whatever-it-is? The answer to that question simultaneously has a lot of layers and is also quite easy to answer with a resounding “no.” Readers of this review will already have made their decision, based on the opening paragraph, about whether something this strange will immediately put them off or instantly intrigue them to the point of checking it out.

This, though, is a movie review, and as such, there are obligations to fulfill: Broadly speaking, a rising number of people start to disappear in the fictional Westridge County (which, really, could exist almost anywhere in the United States), and it might have something to do with Buffet Infinity, a local strip mall that houses several small businesses but really likes to advertise its (you guessed it) endless buffet at the food court. It’s increasingly amusing how much food this place serves, from burgers made of an unceasing variety of stacked ingredients to a truly unholy amount of salad. Indeed, it’s amusing how the food variety never seems to stop, until it really seems like all cultures of the world are represented on the menu.

As for the other businesses in this park, they seem to be populated by souls trapped in some bubble of existence. It may not even be within the realm of possibility to guess what the outside world looks like or means to them, because the filmmaker has constructed this closed world so efficiently. We know it’s unlikely that the proprietor of the food-generating restaurant (played by Allison Bench), the lawyer who can get you the compensation you deserve for any injuries sustained (played by Kevin Singh) and the local pawnshop owner whose vague rap melodies to entice new customers are clearly not working (played by Ahmed Ahmed) only exist within the context of this strange experiment.

In the middle of the strip mall, a great sinkhole has formed from who-knows-where, and a local religious group has offered its help in rescuing whomever they can. At the same time, those disappearances occur at an alarming rate—first, the restaurant owner, after threatening litigation over her special secret sauce, and then, others, all spider-webbing outward from a single source of commercial competition within the strip mall. It’s impossible to know whether revealing any of this is technically revealing too much or, indeed, accurate in the details of revelation.

What does become clear, eventually, are two things: One is the hold this movie puts us in with its general vibe of subjective chaos, grounded by a precision of authenticity in its minute details. The actors are expertly attuned to the assignment handed to them (of particular note is Claire Theobald, who plays the spokesperson of an insurance company who racks up more and more—and more sinister—reasons to need coverage for her home and family), and the editing style and trickery to create the illusion of channel-flipping are occasionally too convincing. Whatever this movie is, it’s quite something, and that’s sometimes enough.

The second thing that becomes clear is, eventually, a theme of some sort, which is apparent in a small subplot involving a sci-fi author (played by Dino Primo) who believes he knows where the disappeared are going—only to be silenced before he can reveal his theory. What that theme happens to be, as with the rest of Buffet Infinity, is a little ambiguous, a little impenetrable and wholly, undeniably something to discover.

Rating: *** (out of ****)