Watch List is a 2020 drama about a widowed mother of three who confronts her own darkness to protect her children in the middle of a drug war.
The “war on drugs” is not fought only in the United States of course, the rampant use of illegal substances a large-scale problem in many nations around the world. In the Philippines, an aggressive campaign by President Rodrigo Duterte called Operation Tokhang is put on the streets, allowing authorities to go door-to-door with a list of names and accuse them of being dealers, pushers, or addicts, and then persuade them to stop and/or join a rehabilitation program.
In Manila, these police knock on Maria Ramon’s (Alessandra de Rossi) door, she a wife, and mother to three children. She admits to being a former addict, as does her husband, so they are forced to leave and are, along with others like them, paraded through the streets to a local camp where they begin the next steps, which includes dancing of all things. However, things quickly go bad, and soon, she is on her own, trying to survive in a time of desperate persecution.
Director and co-writer Ben Rekhi starts his film at the very top of the chain with a real speech by Duterte saying of the three millions drug addicts in his country that he would “gladly slaughter them” like Hitler did with the German Jewish. It’s a raw, almost crippling moment that sets the tone for the story’s zoom in on one woman caught in that tragedy. This leaves her husband shot in the streets and she left to discover who did it. We understand quickly that this is only one strategic death in too many that is devastating communities all over the country.
Rekhi isn’t directly shining an illuminating light on the leaders of the system itself but rather on the impacts of it on a poor family trying to cope, looking for help and answers where none seem reachable. He frames the film first as a drama and then a kind of thriller where Maria sets out to find the killers while she and her children live under a systemic wave of authority-led oppression and rampant drug trade, one that has slowly turned much of the population to the side of the government. Unfortunately, all roads lead to tragedy.
Filmed right in the trenches of all this, Maria slowly becomes the investigative arm in the underground fight for the truth, watching CCTV footage and going on her own door-to-door hunt for help. She is soon sunk into a nightmare of darkness where corruption and violence on all sides dominates the everyday lives of many like her, becoming witness to further pain and suffering. She finds she becomes a link in the chain, and the truth she seeks one that does not come without penance.
Watch List is a gritty film, shrouded in sorrow and despair while trying, much like Maria, to find hope in the shadows. Rekhi is well in control of his story, the visuals authentic and messy while thoroughly weighted. De Rossi is on screen for most of the fim and is genuinely convincing, as are the coils of wrong turns that lead her to further misery in a futile attempt for vengeance. It’s not entirely unpredictable, nor are the harrowing cycles of its themes all that fresh, but Rekhi’s passion project is nonetheless an effective statement filled with heartbreak.