What's Going On In Shudder's Weirdest Movie? 'Buffet Infinity' Ending, Explained

It takes a lot of effort to make a movie scary. While it’s easy to just make a film with empty hallways and creatures jumping out at the viewer with a music sting, true terror is slow and deliberate. It can also be incomprehensibly vast, replicating the unease that H.P. Lovecraft perfected decades ago with his cosmic horror-tinged writings. Films like Color Out of Space (2020) have delivered cosmic horror before, but Buffet Infinity (2026) is something else entirely.

Describing Buffet Infinity is complicated to say the least. To the untrained eye, it’s a nonsensical string of scenes that would feel more at home in an Adult Swim infomercial than a horror movie on Shudder. In fact, it’s entirely believable for someone to watch the first third of this 93-minute movie and have a hard time figuring out exactly what’s going on, and that’s before the ending comes along and unloads a cacophony of sights and sounds meant to confuse and terrify you.

So let’s untackle this ever-expanding web of restaurants, jingles, and news reports to explain the ending of Buffet Infinity. 

What Makes 'Buffet Infinity' So Weird?

Directed by Simon Glassman and taking five years to make, Buffet Infinity is an analog horror film with an unconventional premise: What if a horror movie is told entirely via commercials?

Analog films have been creative with how their horror is presented; just look at Late Night With the Devil (2024) and its near-perfect replication of a late-night talk show. Still, Buffet Infinity’s gimmick is much more difficult to pull off. Outside of a few scenes at the end, the film presents its plot as if you’re watching a local access TV channel. Some commercials on the local access Westridge station are normal, but then there are the commercials for a restaurant called Buffet Infinity.

We’re introduced to the restaurant almost immediately, with its amateurish commercial airing alongside commercials for law firms, pawnshops, and used car dealerships. But then it learns from them. It begins to replicate the ideas, words, and phrases used in other commercials, and even antagonizes and partners with other businesses to ensure its survival and growth.

None of this is ever told to the viewer. You’re meant to infer and read between the lines to realize that Buffet Infinity is an egregore, or thought entity with no physical shape. It exists through the buffet and through television, but by the time people begin to realize what’s going on, it’s already too late, and nothing can save Westridge.

What's Going On In 'Buffet Infinity's Ending?

It’s not uncommon for a horror movie to have a depressing ending. Sometimes viewers are meant to watch our protagonists lose, but in Buffet Infinity, everybody loses. 

After vigorous expansion and manipulating a local lawyer named Mostley Rosin to defend Buffet Infinity in his law firm’s commercials, the buffet has grown to a point where it has driven the inhabitants of Westridge underground. It controls the masses with the sounds of its adverts, and things have gotten so desperate for the survivors that they’re starting to eat themselves rather than consuming the buffet’s food, lest they fall victim to its thrall. However, just as the buffet completely envelops the town, a strange red entity interrupts its transmission and fights back.

This red entity is actually a local author killed earlier in the movie named Langdon P. Hershey. Hershey started a cult not dissimilar to one started by an infamous science-fiction writer of dubious legitimacy. Still, while Buffet Infinity painted the cult in a negative light for most of the film, they’re actually revealed to be the good guys. Hershey has known about the buffet’s true purpose and was running his own ads to bring awareness to its eldritch goals, mostly because he created it. Possibly.

The film says that Hershey engaged in an “experiment,” using his daughter Abigail as part of it, with the buffet eventually emerging from said experiment. It’s unclear whether Abigail is the buffet or if the buffet is using her memories and voice to torment Hershey in the climax, but it’s able to kill Hershey in his ascended form. With the buffet’s assimilation of the town complete, all of its residents now reside within it, blissfully singing the joys of its unbelievable deals.

What's 'Buffet Infinity' Trying To Say?

The ending of Buffet Infinity is very much a “rocks fall, everybody dies” situation. No one is saved, and even the people who were defending the buffet are eventually subsumed by it. So what was the point of it all? 

There are two ways to interpret what’s going on in the film. The first is to take it at face value as a criticism of rampant consumerism. Buffet Infinity is only able to expand by doing everything in its power to get more and more people through its doors. It adds different types of food, bullies the competition, and deploys frivolous gimmicks like arcades, casinos, and hotels to make itself the end-all-be-all restaurant. It kills local businesses, becoming this mega corporation that controls all aspects of Westridge with the population singing its virtues in warm, consumer-friendly jingles.

However, if you wanted to be creative with what Buffet Infinity represents, it also stands as an analog for AI. Remember, when Buffet Infinity first appears, its commercials are incoherent drivel. It’s only through watching other commercials, like an AI, that it learns to develop better ones that aren’t, for lack of a better word, slop. It replicated what it saw, mostly taking ideas from the neighboring Jenny’s Sandwich Shop, to find a way to ingratiate itself with Westridige. There’s huge pushback within the town, like trying to burn it and throwing legal challenges at it, mirroring real-world pushback to data centers. However, when people become more complacent with its convenience and value, it’s all over. Some resist, but they’re eliminated, and eventually everything is under its thrall. With that in mind, Buffet Infinity can be seen as a cautionary tale of the possible near future if AI is allowed to expand with reckless abandon.