Richard Jenkins wears an unidentified watch

In The Shape of Water, Giles sits on his couch beside Elisa with his hands folded in his lap, and a gold watch shows below his cuff. The case is rectangular and taller than it is wide, on a gold link bracelet, with a pale champagne dial that catches the lamplight and burns to a white blur under the crystal. Richard Jenkins plays Giles, the closeted advertising illustrator who lives next door to Elisa in Baltimore in 1962 and narrates the film in voice-over.

Giles paints for a living, by hand, in a trade that photography was already taking over. One of his assignments is a red gelatin dessert for an ad, which his client sends him back to repaint. He is fastidious and behind his moment, and the watch suits him: formal gold worn with a jacket and tie on his own sofa, the kind of dress watch a careful man keeps for decades. Guillermo del Toro wrote the part for Ian McKellen, and when McKellen was unavailable he emailed Jenkins, who took it. The film went on to win Best Picture.

Del Toro stages 1962 down to the hieroglyph print on the couch, but the watch keeps its name to itself: the dial is bright and blank in the frame, the lettering under the crystal lost to the glare. What is plain is the watch itself, gold and rectangular, the case half under the cuff of a man who renders other people's products in exact detail and keeps his own watch out of full view.