The 12 Days of Christine 2015

Christine Sheridan Smith arrives home to her flat with Adam Tom Riley, whom she has just met at a New Year’s party, and settles into a life that starts with a spark of new romance and quickly leaves the future in a delicate, unfolding balance. Thirteen months later, on Valentine’s Day, Christine chats with her flatmate Fung Stacy Liu at home, relaying the quiet details of her evolving relationship with Adam while a card from her first boyfriend—an echo from a past she thought she’d forgotten—arrives and lingers in the air, hinting at memories she never fully resolved. On Mother’s Day, Christine’s mother Marion Michele Dotrice visits and pulls Christine back into a vein of family history, revealing that Christine’s first boyfriend died when he was just 16, a piece of history Christine had misplaced in the folds of time. Marion’s gentle persistence nudges Christine toward marriage with Adam, even as Christine’s father Ernie Paul Copley battles Alzheimer’s and slips further from the person he once was, a struggle that colors Christine’s choices with a quiet gravity.

The following year brings a shift: Adam moves in with Christine at Easter, and Christine secretly plans a small surprise for him. A disturbance comes in the form of an egg smashing on a nearby wall, a seemingly ordinary moment that unsettles her, and in the kitchen she is approached by an unknown man, the Stranger Reece Shearsmith, who murmuringly offers a single, heavy message:

I’m sorry.

As time threads forward, Christine, now pregnant and married, wakes on a May bank holiday to a life that feels both intimate and fragile. Adam and Christine work together to assemble a cot, a task that becomes a quiet test of their partnership. Thirteen months later, on Father’s Day, Adam tends to their son Jack Dexter Little in the stillness of the night, while Christine’s nerves murmur with the sense that something is stitched into their routine that does not belong to it. From the baby monitor comes the Stranger’s voice again, a chilling line:

Come on little man, let’s get you out of there.

Christine rushes to Jack’s room and finds the cot empty, fear gripping her as she cries out for Adam, who returns from another room with Jack in his arms, the crisis somehow contained, though the air remains taut with unspoken fear. Thirteen months pass and Christine reaches her 30th birthday, a milestone that should feel celebratory yet instead sits within the shadow of a widening distance: Ernie no longer recognises Christine, and Adam grows more interested in his colleague Zara Jessica Ellerby. Marion, ever the warden of ritual, blindfolds Christine for a game of blind man’s buff—an annual birthday ritual Christine has played since she was six—and the moment grows tense as suspicious noises drift from behind a door, forcing Christine to remove her blindfold and confront what she cannot quite name.

Another time shift follows: now divorced from Adam, Christine films Jack as he prepares for his first day of school, a quiet, poignant moment that frames the aftermath of the life they had hoped to build. Left alone in the flat, she finds comfort with Ernie, who remains a fragile anchor in a house that has become a labyrinth. On Halloween, she dresses up with her friend Bobby Steve Pemberton, a colleague at Clarks, and when someone she believes to be Adam enters to collect Jack, Christine hurryingly moves toward Jack’s room and finds him in the Stranger’s arms, a further fracture in a life that keeps looping through these same scenes with an unnerving sameness.

Bonfire Night seals the pattern in a different light: Christine returns home with Jack, who has burned his hand on a sparkler, but Marion notes that Jack’s injury mirrors a scar Christine herself bore at his age, a revelation that tightens the loom of fate around them all. Christmas gathers the extended circle—Marion, Ernie, Fung, Bobby, and Adam—around a table that feels like a turning point. Christine and Adam are back together, and she unpacks a present that is more than a album of photos: it is a crystallization of the life she has lived, and in that moment she realizes what is happening in the most intimate sense. The Stranger’s claims—he says he stepped onto the road by accident, that he rescued Jack but could not reach Christine—illuminate the truth: Christine has been dying as a result of a road collision, and emergency services struggle to free her while memories replay themselves in a final, poignant montage.

At the dinner table, Jack returns dressed as a Nativity angel, and the family cycles through the ritual one last time. Marion gently signals that it is time for Christine to go, and with a final, heartrending goodbye, Christine’s story folds into the memory of those who remain, leaving behind a life that seems to have always lived on the edge of time.