Leap Year

Director: Michael Rowe
Year Released: 2010
Rating: 1.0

A pudgy journalist (Monica del Carmen) stays in her apartment, makes phone calls, eats ice cream, watches TV and engages in risky sexual endeavors with several men, including one budding actor (Gustavo Sánchez Parra) who's into rough trade. It has atmosphere and tension going for it - since it's confined to a cramped, dark apartment - but is light on substance: it makes mention that the lead's 'goal' is to die on the 29th of February (for reasons significant to her and her past), but it doesn't really penetrate her psyche the way it labors over the perverse, like the scene in which she's (willingly) urinated on (in confining the movie to her apartment, it also limits how she interacts with the 'normal' populace). At least first time director Rowe usurps the fatalism at the conclusion with a dose of family.