Mads Mikkelsen wears a Seiko Sportura

A man in a torn red parka trudges across the snow in front of the wrecked plane he now lives in, a wing-shaped patch on his chest reading OVERGÅRD. He is Mads Mikkelsen, alone on screen for most of Joe Penna's Arctic (2018), Penna's first feature, which premiered at Cannes. Overgård survives on routine: fishing lines, an SOS sign, a hand-cranked beacon. The routine runs on a watch alarm, and the film lets you hear it, over and over.

aBlogtoWatch identified both the watch and the unusual way it is worn. The piece is "a Seiko ref. SSC357," the Sportura Solar Chronograph Perpetual, a now-discontinued quartz chronograph that charges from light, "so it would never need a battery." And it is not on his wrist. The production strapped it to the outside of the red parka's sleeve, under a small black flap, where Overgård can read it without baring skin to the cold. The site called it "not merely a piece of his costume, but rather an integral part of the story": near the poles, in the months of permanent light, the alarm is what keeps a castaway from losing track of time altogether.

When a rescue helicopter answers his beacon and crashes in the attempt, the pilot dies and a young woman survives it badly hurt, so Overgård lashes her to a sledge and starts dragging her toward a distant station. The beeping keeps coming through the whole ordeal. The detail aBlogtoWatch noticed is the one the film never shows: the SSC357 carries a single alarm on a 12-hour dial, which means that somewhere off screen, a man at the end of the world keeps resetting it.