’Twelve Minutes’ Is a Diabolical Dive Into the Human Psyche

How far would you go if pushed into a corner? What, truly, are you capable of?

These are questions many of us will have considered in our darkest moments, perhaps alone at home or in a deep nightmarish sleep. We’ll likely have imagined what could drive us to such depraved extremes—the threatened life of a loved one? How about outright greed or lust?

Twelve Minutes confronts these questions head-on through the lens of the home-invasion thriller. A husband and wife, voiced by James McAvoy and Daisy Ridley, are celebrating news of their first pregnancy. Playing as the husband, you help set the table using a classic point-and-click-adventure system of interaction—items combine with other items, objects, and people, viewed from a top-down perspective. But then, horror strikes: A cop, played with fierce intensity by Willem Dafoe, arrives at the door accusing your wife of murder. It’s up to you to find a way out of this terrible situation, all without leaving the cramped three rooms of the apartment, rendered in rich colors like a classic Hollywood movie. Cinephiles may also note a resemblance between this premise and that of Alfred Hitchock’s Dial M for Murder, another single-apartment home-invasion thriller. This is true, but there’s another key movie influence behind game creator Luis Antonio’s absorbing debut.

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Time, as the game’s title implies, is an escapable presence. The first shot is that of a ticking stopwatch, a motif that draws a clear line between this and the pulsing, metronomic work of Christopher Nolan. But the clock is also the central device that gives Twelve Minutes its video game feeling. At various points, perhaps because of death or something else, you, the husband, are catapulted back to the first seconds of the loop that lasts the titular 12 minutes. It’s a conceit that takes the foundational elements of video games, their win-lose conditions, the need to replay levels or scenarios in order to progress, and moulds a story around them. By leaning into the medium’s artifice, Twelve Minutes attempts to transcend it.

Courtesy of Nomada LLC.