Nicolas Cage wears a Hamilton Khaki Field

In an abandoned building, a blind man lifts a burning torch so Mike Lawford can read the wall, and the wall carries the same three words scrawled over and over: pay the ghost. Nicolas Cage plays Lawford, a literature professor whose young son Charlie was taken from a Halloween carnival almost a year earlier. He has spent the months since chasing the boy through the city, onto a bus that turns out to be empty and into rooms full of squatters who mask their fires because, the blind man tells him, the screaming comes every year just before Halloween.

The watch Lawford wears is a Hamilton Khaki Field Day Date Automatic, reference H70505833: a 42mm steel field watch with a black dial and a brown leather strap, water resistant to a modest 50 meters, and one of the cheaper automatics Hamilton makes. It is built to be read at a glance and otherwise left alone, and its movement keeps an 80-hour reserve, so it holds the day and the date through a long weekend off the wrist, unwound and unworn.

A day-date watch exists to answer one question, what day is it, and Pay the Ghost runs entirely on the answer. Charlie was taken on Halloween. The screams come every year before Halloween, the blind man says, and Lawford has until the next one to find him. The watch can name that day. It cannot keep it from coming back.