Robert Pattinson wears a Hamilton Khaki Navy BeLOWZERO

In the tense quiet of Christopher Nolan's Tenet, before everything goes loud, Neil stands beside the Protagonist and looks off at something neither of them likes. Robert Pattinson plays Neil in a grey suit, blond and unhurried, the picture of a well-bred Englishman who has wandered into the wrong room. On his wrist is a round watch with a vivid blue dial and a dark case, a busy sporty face you would never mistake for a thin dress watch. It is clearly visible, and it never resolves into a name, which in a film about people who cannot tell whether time is running forward or backward is almost too fitting.

The watch the film does document is a different one, and its story is the good part. Hamilton was Tenet's official watch, and production designer Nathan Crowley spent the better part of eighteen months with the brand at Swatch Group's facilities in Switzerland developing a bespoke Khaki Navy BeLOWZERO with a digital display set into the dial. The commercial version that followed came in blue-tipped and red-tipped references, each limited to 888 pieces, a small joke aimed at the palindrome in the title. It was not Hamilton's first call from Nolan either, the brand having already built the Murph watch that drives the most wrenching scene in Interstellar, the kind of relationship that gets a watchmaker invited back.