Alphabet Lane: Love Letters to the Middle of Nowhere
- Ben Sorensen
- Apr 20
- 3 min read
There's something both tender and faintly unhinged about the premise of Alphabet Lane. A couple, marooned in the open silence of rural New South Wales, begin writing letters to imaginary friends. Not as therapy. Not as a creative exercise. Just because what else are you going to do out there?
It's a genuinely great idea. And James Litchfield, in his debut feature, knows it is.
Anna (Tilda Cobham-Hervey) and Jack (Nicholas Denton) have just moved from Sydney to a remote corner of New South Wales, with schedules almost perfectly designed to ensure they never actually see
each other. He's an engineer; she's a doctor doing night shifts. The distance between them isn't dramatic. It's administrative. Which is somehow worse.
When Jack claims to have made a new friend, a farmer named "Joe" Anna invents a wife for him: "Michelle." What begins as a dry in-joke curdles into something stranger and more necessary. Letters are exchanged. Personas are developed. The imaginary people start to feel more real than the actual ones.
The film is gorgeous. There's no other word for it. Litchfield shot much of Alphabet Lane on his family's cattle farm in the Monaro region of New South Wales (the house he grew up in) and draws on his strong affinity for the landscape and a pointed sense of place. The Monaro Plains don't just serve as backdrop here; they press in. The big, cold light, the expanse of paddock, the long dirt driveways stretching between two people who technically live together, it all does a lot of heavy lifting that the script occasionally struggles to carry.
Cobham-Hervey who made her name in the critically acclaimed 52 Tuesdays before starring as Helen Reddy in I Am Woman is the film's emotional compass. She's doing something genuinely subtle in this role; you can feel the distance in Anna before a word of dialogue has been spoken. Nicholas Denton, as the slightly hapless Jack, has a quality that's harder to read which is either the point or the problem, depending on how generous you're feeling. Henry Nixon, as the rough-but-honest farmer Corey, is an exceptional presence and the film's most grounded performance.
Litchfield isn't just making a film about isolation in the country. He's making a film about the private language that lovers build and what happens when that language starts speaking for itself.
And that's where things get interesting, and occasionally murky. Alphabet Lane is unafraid of metaphor. Sometimes aggressively so. The imaginary friends aren't just a quirky plot device; they're clearly meant to represent something; the selves Anna and Jack can't quite present to each other directly, the version of the relationship that can only exist on paper. It's a rich idea. It's also, at times, a frustratingly opaque one.
The film trusts its audience, which is admirable. It also occasionally trusts them a little too much.
The score, by Mark Bradshaw (You Won't Be Alone), incorporates the distinctive humming of actors Ben Whishaw and Alice Englert. The result is a soundscape that feels as curious and whimsical, and quietly unsettling, as the story itself. It makes otherwise gentle scenes feel faintly wrong, like a lullaby played in the wrong key. You feel watched, then held, then both at once.
Set against the vast Monaro Plains, the film trades cliché for a patient, wry portrait of urban reinvention, where landscape becomes psychological terrain with a subtle hint of something Lynchian humming beneath the ordinary.
Alphabet Lane is the kind of debut that announces a filmmaker worth watching rather than a fully formed masterpiece. Litchfield has a real sense of place, genuine wit, and a visual grammar that belongs entirely to him. What he hasn't quite cracked yet is how to make two people feel as vivid and knowable as the landscape that surrounds them. When the film trusts its strange, playful instincts, it sings. When it retreats into metaphor without a map, it drifts.
But drifting, in this particular corner of Australia, still looks spectacular.
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