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| Buffet Infinity Photo: Fantasia International Film Festival |
One of the more unusual cinematic creations at Fantasia 2025, Buffet Infinity is a film presented almost entirely as a series of adverts, with the occasional brief news clip to deliver some exposition. Over time, a distinct subtext emerges, with the film becoming at once more comedic and more sinister. Some people will doubtless refuse to engage with it at all, but I loved it, so I was glad to get the chance to converse with director Simon Glassman, even if it was difficult to know where to begin.
“The initial concept was probably from when I was a preteen watching television really late at night,” he says. “Sometimes when you're 14 or 13 and you're just watching television, there's no algorithm, so you're just watching things that you're not interested in. Like a Jeanne Lau thing for two and a half hours, then you're watching matches commercials, and then you're watching adult diaper commercials. You're not actually paying attention. You're just kind of fantasising about what could be happening inside of those commercials. And so over the years – I don't know – I imagine everybody does it, but where you're watching it and you're imagining ‘Wouldn't it be cool if these were all connected and they all had a singular narrative?’ Or if you're a weirdo, you know, ‘What if somebody's head blew off or something horrible happened?’ That's where the initial idea came from.
“At the very beginning of Covid I went on a deep dive of old Nineties commercials, and old buffet commercials were always the scariest because there would always be singular .jpgs and then really, really poorly done voiceover and then maybe like a CGI lion just reaching out. Something about the production value and the way that they were made – it was almost better than a horror movie to me because it was like, ‘What is that restaurant? What are they selling?’ It seems terrifying.
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| Simon Glassman Photo: Fantasia International Film Festival |
“There was a cut of the film that had a lot more Lovecraft and a lot more lore inserted into it. But it's the way that we were trying to do the exposition and try and layer things in. It was really hard to go really deep into it. And the theme of the movie is seeing one thing and then something completely different is going on offscreen. So the less we explain, usually the better.”
There’s a lot of challenging work there for the actors, who do a marvellous job of delivering their lines fluently even when what they’re saying makes less and less sense, or when the arrangement of words itself is unnatural.
“Although we don't have any actual commercials, there's a big, big chunk of stock footage in the film,” he says. “When I was making it initially there was a 22 minute cut of the film that was all stock footage. No actors at all. I wanted to see if I could make a whole horror film that was entirely based on only stock footage, almost as a commentary on stock footage itself or movies itself, because it's like, you know, if you're watching Friday The 13th, the actors kind of don't matter. You want to just watch them get killed. But I've worked with actors for a while, and everybody did a really good job. One of the actors is right here.”
“Hi!” she says cheerily, jumping in from the side of the room. I recognise her at once and tell her that I loved her scenes.
“My name is Claire Thibault. I play Insurance Lady, and I think, to your point where a lot of this movie is about perverting those expectations, this is content we're so familiar with. If you've grown up in this era in the Western hemisphere, watching television late at night, just on in the background, these things follow a formula. And so that's where I think it is funny and twisted, where all of a sudden it starts out feeling normal and then you're like, ‘Wait a second - what did they just say?’
“It was really collaborative. What was nice about doing the film in the way we did it was we had a lot of time to experiment and try things and work it out together. I think that's why it ends up feeling so natural. Simon had a very strong vision that we all really bought into. I think we really clearly understood what this was. And so then he was very much able to give us that gentle direction while still giving us a lot of leeway to create these characters together.”
I tell them that the other thing it made me think about was AI, because the language develops in the way that it does when one gets an AI to read something and it doesn't know what the words mean, and it arranges them in a form that seems right.
“Well, we were making the film before those Midjourney videos started coming out,” says Simon. “I was watching them and I was like, ‘Oh, yeah, that's what it is. I mean, I don't like that AI is making videos generally, but that they're able to have a performer say something that is just completely insane without having any sort of link to the camera at all, I don't know.” He shakes his head, looking suddenly worried and laughing. “Now I'm in a place where I'm complimenting AI.”
The other thing I was reminded of, I say, was Kyle Edward Ball’s Skinamarink. The idea that there's something alien that's looking at familiar things in our world and doesn't quite grasp what they are or what they're for.
“Yeah,” he says. “I've never met Kyle Ball. He seems very cool, and I like Skinamarink. I remember watching and being like, ‘That's really cool. I wish I could make something like that.’ Something that I love about it is that it's completely from a child's perspective, and the way that they just like left the camera dangling on the old public domain cartoons – I mean, I don't think that this is Skinamarink 2, but I do feel like I was pretty inspired by it.”
There are news clips in this film, which give it a bit more context.
“Yeah. I tried to keep that as minimal as possible because it's like storytelling scaffolding. It's like it has to be there, but the more you can cut out, the better everybody's performing in terms of the actual narrative. The story is all said in subtext, so if I don't have to use a news segment, then I would hope not to. This movie's gone through so many different edits. There's one that was endless news articles and it was almost like an oral history. I was watching, I was like, ‘I do not enjoy this. This is not fun to watch.’”
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| Buffet Infinity Photo: Fantasia International Film Festival |
I ask how it was assembled, because it’s clear that there were a lot of revisions and new ideas along the way.
“It's the performances and it's writing,” he says. “But I think that the star of the movie is editing. It's showing how deceptive it can be while also showing, like, you can actually write a whole story that you don't even see.
“There's a certain point in the film where it's no longer the film. Buffet Infinity is making its own film. I won't say when it is, I think if you watch it, it'll be pretty clear.”
And then it ends on a musical number. That seems very old Hollywood, in a way.
“It's just a fun way to end a movie.” He shrugs, having started to say something else but thought better of it. “I remember when I was a little kid being like, ‘Man, it would be fun to end a movie on a musical number.’ And I guess there's a more clear narrative reason, but I feel like I'll just leave it at that.”
He’s fairly confident about how audiences will respond to it.
“It's a very gimmicky movie, and I feel like gimmicky gets a lot of attention usually.”
As for Fantasia...
“It’s so cool. I mean, it's my first time in Montreal. My partner and my baby are at home, so I'm not going to a lot of parties or anything. We went to the Biodome. That was really cool. But, yeah, I mean, I'm from Edmonton, so I'm just like, ‘Whoa, that building is more than six stories!”
“If you don't mind if I insert myself a little bit, Fantasia has been such a fantastic experience, I think, for artists and creators,” says Claire. “Having the platform to show your work is so important. And being here, being surrounded by so many other creative people, is very inspiring and it has been incredibly supportive the whole way through. I mean, it has been a genuine pleasure to be here and to share in this experience through Fantasia.”
“We went to see Office Party,” adds Simon, “which is an old Eighties movie with the director and Michael Ironside doing a Q&A after. It was cool because I'm a huge Michael Ironside fan and he's just great in the movie too.”
He doesn’t see himself making another film set in the same universe as Buffet Infinity, but he does expect his next work to have similar themes.
