Amy Adams wears a Bulgari Serpenti

Tom Ford built Nocturnal Animals around a woman alone with a book. Susan Morrow, a Los Angeles gallery owner played by Amy Adams, receives a manuscript from Edward, the ex-husband she walked out on years earlier, played by Jake Gyllenhaal, and the film splits in two as she reads it: her composed present life on one track, the brutal Texas thriller he has written on the other. Ford came to directing from fashion, where he ran Gucci and then his own house, and he dresses Susan the way he dresses a runway, every surface controlled. When the film holds on her at the white desk before that deep-red wall, hands clasped under her chin, the manuscript open on a gold laptop and a row of water glasses lined up beside her, the camera lets a single ornament do the talking on her left wrist.

It is a Bulgari Serpenti, the gold bracelet wrapping the wrist several times in flexible, ribbed coils. The construction is Tubogas, Bulgari's signature technique of forming a hollow gold tube without solder so it bends and springs like a length of gas pipe, which is exactly what the name means. The Serpenti line goes back to the 1940s, when Bulgari began coiling these snake bracelets so the dial could sit where the snake's head would be, and Susan wears it the way the design intends, as jewelry first and a watch second. There is no jeweled snake-head on this one and no logo readable in the frame, just the unmistakable wound-gold silhouette.

That is the small joke of putting it on this particular character. A Serpenti Tubogas is a watch you read by uncoiling your wrist and looking, not by glancing, and Susan Morrow has stopped paying real attention to the time she is living in. Ford gives her a beautiful, expensive thing that makes telling the hour slightly inconvenient, and lets it sit on the wrist of a woman trying very hard not to feel anything while she reads the worst thing anyone ever wrote about her.