Jake Gyllenhaal wears a Breitling Chronomat

Nightcrawler (2014) opens with a man cutting through a chain-link fence to steal copper wire. A security guard catches him. While the guard questions him, Louis Bloom looks down and notices the watch on the guard's wrist, and a few seconds later he has beaten the man senseless and taken it. Jake Gyllenhaal plays Bloom, a gaunt, unblinking sociopath who talks like a management seminar and films Los Angeles car wrecks for the morning news. Dan Gilroy directed. For the role, Gyllenhaal lost a startling amount of weight, and the first thing his character does on screen is acquire, by force, a watch far too big for the body he is left with.

The watch is a Breitling Chronomat Evolution, forty-four millimeters of stainless steel with a white dial and bold, jarring numbers on its subdials. It is not a quiet watch. It belongs to the mid-2000s, the height of the big-watch moment, when nothing about a luxury chronograph was meant to be clean or restrained. On the right wrist it would read as money. On Bloom's, it reads as theft. It never fits. It slides around, it turns upside down, and at times there is nearly an inch of air between the case and his arm.

The watch tells you who Bloom is faster than any line of dialogue. He is performing a success he has not earned, on a body he has starved down to almost nothing, and the loud, expensive thing he beat a stranger to get hangs off him like it belongs to someone else. It does. And he cannot fill it.