Willem Dafoe, James McAvoy and Daisy Ridley star in Twelve Minutes, a video game thriller with a Groundhog Day-like conceit
- McAvoy voices a husband trapped in a time loop while his wife, Ridley, is accused of murder by Dafoe, an intruder in their compact one-bedroom apartment
- Creator Luis Antonio, a veteran of Ubisoft and Rockstar Games, says the game could have worked as a movie but its structure as a game makes it feel more personal
Twelve Minutes begins with a revelation. A wife and a husband sit down for a late-night dessert and the wife starts to tell the husband that she’s pregnant.
What happens next will forever change their lives.
Depending on how we play – and the information at hand – expect an intruder claiming to be a cop, accusations of murder, actual acts of murder, a mystery involving a family heirloom, secrets some would prefer forgotten, an apartment filled with hidden compartments and, to conclude, some arguably scary B-movie twists that reveal that sometimes we never really know those we love the most.
“Things like this just don’t get forgiven,” says the wife, voiced by Daisy Ridley, of the hellish night of traumatic divulgences in which Twelve Minutes is set.
Twelve Minutes is an exquisitely designed puzzle game disguised as a cinematic thriller, with the stars to match: Ridley, James McAvoy as the husband and Willem Dafoe as the intruder lead the cast.