Charlize Theron wears an unidentified watch

In a dim room somewhere in The Old Guard, the 2020 Netflix action film, Andy leans toward a doorframe and closes her eyes, worn out. Charlize Theron plays her, and the thing the movie keeps circling is that Andy is tired in a way no one else can be. Her full name is Andromache of Scythia. She is thousands of years old, the oldest of a small band of immortals who cannot die and have long since stopped expecting to. In this quiet beat she looks exactly as exhausted as someone who has seen everything twice. Her right arm is up against the frame, and on that wrist is a watch.

You would expect the watch to be the interesting part, and on most wrists it would be. Here it stays a mystery. Her arm is turned so the dial faces her own skin, the room is dark, and what reaches the camera is only the shape, a round black case on a plain black strap, lit by a glint off the crystal. There is no brand to read. The watch enthusiasts who comb these films found the chunky G-Shock on one of her teammates, but Andy's plain black watch went unrecorded, and the film offers no help with it either.

There is a strange poetry in that. An unbranded, unreadable watch sits on the one person alive who least needs to know what time it is. Andy is older than the idea of the clock, and the movie's whole ache is that she has grown tired of time, of waking up for another century she never asked for. A plain modern watch you cannot even put a name to is an oddly human thing for her to be wearing, and maybe that is the point. After thousands of years, she is still strapping on the same small machine the rest of us use to get through a Tuesday.