Alphabet Lane is an unsettling new drama that rejects the myth of the idyllic country life
- Written by Jessica Gildersleeve, Professor of English Literature, University of Southern Queensland
As early as the poetry of AB “Banjo” Paterson, urban Australians have been drawn to the pastoral fantasy of the outback, in which, as Paterson famously puts it, “the drover’s life has pleasures that the townsfolk never know”.
The danger of this fantasy is what lies at the centre of James Litchfield’s Alphabet Lane, a haunting new film in which the isolation of rural life sends a young couple down a dark and desperate path of psychological collapse.
Country romance or rural terror?
The Australian outback is a common source of romantic ideals – recalling the freedom of the drover and the more modern “tree-change” – but also of sublime terror, in which the seemingly endless landscape and the creatures it harbours are of equal threat.
Early works of Australian Gothic, such as Barbara Baynton’s short story The Chosen Vessel (1896) and Henry Lawson’s story The Drover’s Wife (1892), often combined these tropes, recognising the peril inherent even in the romantic figure of the drover.
Similarly to these classics of the genre, Alphabet Lane makes use of both perceptions to offer a unique take on the loneliness and fear of the outback that is attributable to human – rather than environmental – menace.
Emphasis on isolation
Jack (Nicholas Denton) and Anna (Tilda Cobham-Hervey) are a young professional couple who have moved to a small rural area. Although they both work in the nearby town, they’ve chosen to live much further outside the township in pursuit of their vision of country life.
They work opposite shifts, and often only meet as they pass one another on the road. The loneliness means they aren’t adjusting well in their new home. They both feel rejected by the locals, who are at least indifferent – if not unfriendly.
Their town isn’t like the welcoming, slower-paced rural worlds of Blue Heelers (1994–2006), A Country Practice (1981–93) or McLeod’s Daughters (2001–09). It’s not even like the famous Yabba of Ted Kotcheff’s film Wake in Fright (1971), in which the locals enforce mateship through binge drinking and reckless violence. Here, the locals simply keep to themselves. They are “cunt-ry folk”, Anna jokes.
Silence is the key note of Alphabet Lane. The opening scenes feature no dialogue: only the sounds of crows and cows calling, the crunch of boots on gravel, and the whir of a ute speeding along a road. Long shots of the outback landscape, sometimes featuring a small, lone figure, emphasise the isolation.
Imaginary friends
Where Alphabet Lane becomes intriguing is in how Jack and Anna respond to their situation.
As a solution to their misery, the couple create Joe, an imaginary friend. Letters to and from Joe are addressed to his fictional home on Alphabet Lane. These letters become a way for the reticent Jack and Anna to reconnect and share their private concerns with one another.
However, Joe, his imaginary wife Michelle and son Peter are soon taking over the couple’s lives, becoming the only topic of conversation. When Jack returns home from work, Anna’s response to his greeting is now just “there’s a letter in the kitchen for you”.
The couple begin to drift apart as Jack attempts to integrate into the community. Anna, meanwhile, retreats into the controlled safety of their imaginary friendship with Joe and Michelle, where she casts herself as their saviour while they struggle with the challenges of their drug-using adult son.
The “bee boop boop boop” of their pretend telephone calls to Joe shifts from whimsical to menacing, from private joke to a worrying delusion – a signifier not of their shared play, but of an insistence on different beliefs that threaten a permanent rift between the couple.
This tension reaches its peak when Jack tries to end the game with an abrupt “killing off” of Joe and Michelle. This devastates Anna. “Do you even love me, Jack?” she asks – a question loaded with the expectation that he rejoin her imaginary world.
Folie à deux
Jack’s recommitment to his belief in Joe symbolises his recommitment to Anna, but at great cost. The film’s final scenes constitute a rapid escalation of the couple’s folie à deux, a shared delusion brought about by their very isolation.
The conclusion gestures towards The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), a classic horror film which also makes use of rural seclusion as the source of psychological instability and moral collapse.
But perhaps, more powerfully, it is also a call back to those early works of Australian Gothic, in its recognition that the real threat of the outback is the insistence on misreading danger as romance.
Alphabet Lane is in cinemas from today.
Authors: Jessica Gildersleeve, Professor of English Literature, University of Southern Queensland
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