Sam Jaeger wears an IWC Aquatimer

In a grey, misty exterior near the start of Lucky Number Slevin, the camera holds on the left wrist of Nick Fisher and lets the watch fill the frame. The dial reads "IWC SCHAFFHAUSEN" in plain block lettering, with a day-and-date window at three o'clock showing "TUE 14." It is an IWC Aquatimer Chronograph, reference 3719: a steel diver with a black dial, an internal rotating dive bezel turned by a second crown, three chronograph registers, and a screw-down crown flanked by two pushers. Paul McGuigan, the director, frames it as a real object on a real arm, close enough to read, which is rare for a film that spends most of its running time hiding who people actually are.

That hiding is the whole point, and the watch is part of it. The film puts the same IWC Aquatimer on two men. Sam Jaeger wears it as Nick Fisher, the friend whose apartment and debts the story turns on. Josh Hartnett wears it as Slevin Kelevra, the man everyone keeps mistaking for Fisher. Dressing both wrists in the identical diver quietly props up the long con that drives the plot, because if you are going to be taken for someone else, looking like him on the wrist helps. The Aquatimer is a serious ISO-rated dive chronograph built for the water. Here it does its most important work sitting still and being read for the day and the date, in a film obsessed with the wrong man on the wrong day.