Penumbra opens with Marga (Cristina Brondo) standing in front of an apartment building in Buenos Aires. She is an attorney who lives in Spain, but she comes to Argentina for work once a year. Marga and her sister inherited the apartment from their parents and Marga has an appointment to meet a realtor in hopes of renting out the rundown space. After waiting outside, Marga goes into the building, finding Jorge (Berta Muniz) standing by the door. He confirms that he is from the real estate agent and allows Marga to show him the property. He then promptly agrees to rent the space at a rate which is far higher than Marga had hoped. Despite the fact that Marga has an important pending appointment for her job, she agrees to wait in the apartment with Jorge for someone to come to the apartment with a contract. As the two wait, other representatives from the agency arrive at the flat, but none of them has the contract. As the hours go by, Marga begins to suspect that something odd is going on.

Penumbra (an astronomy term which refers to the shadow of a sunspot or an eclipse) comes from the makers of Cold Sweat (something that I didn't realize until after I'd viewed it). Cold Sweat was a flawed film, but it took an interesting look at the classic siege film (it's essentially a South American take on The People Under the Stairs). While the movie was criminally underwritten and lack in story and character development, it was able to take a unique premise and milk it for some tension.

With Penumbra, Co-Writers/Co-Directors Adrian Garcia Bogliano and Ramiro Garcia Bogliano pay a bit more attention to the character development side of things. Through a series of phone calls to her sister, her co-workers, and her lover, we learn what kind of person Marga is. Using this interesting technique, it doesn't take us long to ascertain that Marga is impatient, conceited, manipulative, racist, and based on the fact that she is having an affair with a married man, presumably lacking in morals. We also see how her interaction with a homeless man on the street takes a turn for the worst, showing that she has no sympathy. While we are only with Marga for a few hours on a single day, we do get a good deal of information about her.

It's too bad that no work went into the rest of the script. Ostensibly, Penumbra is a suspense thriller. Any movie fan worth their salt knows about Alfred Hitchcock's theories on shock versus suspense. Somehow, Penumbra offers neither. The movie just goes on and on with nothing significant happening. During the first half of the movie, tension is supposed to be building, but here's the problem -- the audience doesn't have enough information to know what should be making us tense. We know that Marga is a bitch and that an eclipse is coming and that's about it. We hope that something will happen, and we assume that it will be something sinister, but the only thing that grows is tedium. When something finally does happen, it's meant to be shocking. However, this fails as well. First of all, only the densest of viewers will be surprised by the twist. Secondly, the motivations of the people who have come to the apartment is purposely kept very vague, thus we have no idea what we should be afraid of.

The film's finale and epilogue are meant to be shocking, but all of they do is make us realize that we've just watched a real long episode of Tales from the Crypt. The epilogue is meant to be the final "gotcha!", as it features a classic EC Comics twist, but it's just the last groaner in an already pointless movie. Penumbra could have worked well as a short, where we would have been much more forgiving of its vague nature, but as a 90-minute movie, it only tries our patience.

Penumbra offers a lot of elevators and stairs on DVD courtesy of IFC Midnight/MPI Media. The film has been letterboxed at 2.35:1 and the transfer is enhanced for 16 x 9 TVs. The picture is fairly sharp and clear, as it shows no distracting grain and no defects from the source material. However, the image isn't perfect. The picture is somewhat dark at times and the colors are drab. The image is notably flat looking. There's nothing out of the ordinary here, this is simply a low-budget foreign film whose limitation are highlighted by the transfer. The DVD carries a Dolby Digital 5.1 audio track which provides clear dialogue and sound effects. The track is somewhat limited, as we don't get many significant surround and stereo effects. This is unfortunate, as it could have tken advantage of the many sounds occurring in the apartment. The English subtitles are easy to read.

The lone extra on the Penumbra DVD is the TRAILER for the film.