Jennifer Garner wears a Frederique Constant Slim Line

Before the cartel, before the five years away, before any of it, there is a quiet warm-lit room and a girl. Pierre Morel shot Peppermint in 2018 as a straightforward revenge picture: Jennifer Garner's Riley North is a suburban mother whose husband and daughter are murdered by a drug crew, and when the corrupt courts let the killers walk she disappears, trains for five years, and comes back to kill everyone involved. The watch belongs to the first act, to the woman she was before all of that. In the scene where you see it, Riley leans toward her young daughter Carly in a soft domestic moment, and on the adult wrist in the foreground sits a slim round dress watch, a light silver-white dial, simple baton hands, a polished thin case, a thin dark leather strap. It is the kind of unfussy watch a suburban mother actually wears.

What it is not, on screen, is legible. No readable name survives at this resolution, and the warm tungsten light tints the case so you cannot honestly call the metal steel or rose gold. It has the shape of a Frederique Constant Slimline, thin case, clean dial, leather strap, exactly the brand's dress register. Frederique Constant occupies an unusual corner of the Swiss market, affordable enough for a middle-class mother yet still Swiss enough to mean something; Peter and Aletta Stas founded it in Geneva in 1988 and built its name on putting in-house movements into watches under three thousand dollars, and the Slimline is the dressiest thing they make. On a pre-tragedy Riley North it reads as the watch a woman buys herself for a birthday, nice without being extravagant. There is a small fitting irony in the film never letting us read it. The watch stays as anonymous as the life she is about to lose.