Alphabet Lane

Anna (Tilda Cobham-Hervey) and Jack (Nicholas Denton) are a young professional couple who relocate from Sydney to a remote rural area of Australia, seeking an idyllic country lifestyle. The reality is starkly different: they work opposite shifts — Jack in construction during the day, Anna as a doctor at night — and their only consistent contact is a brief roadside meeting on a dirt road between their commutes. Despite being together, they struggle to genuinely connect, growing increasingly isolated both from each other and from the indifferent local community around them. Out of boredom and loneliness, Jack invents a fictional acquaintance named Joe, complete with a wife, Michelle, and a son, Peter. The couple begins exchanging letters to and from Joe, addressed to his imaginary home on Alphabet Lane, using the correspondence as a way to voice feelings they cannot say to each other directly. What starts as a light shared joke gradually consumes them. Joe, Michelle, and Peter become the couple's primary topic of conversation, crowding out their real relationship. While Anna grows deeply emotionally invested in the fictional family, Jack begins to pull away, making tentative attempts to build an actual social life in the community. When Jack tries to end the fantasy by 'killing off' Joe and Michelle in their letter game, Anna's anguished response — 'Do you even love me, Jack?' — lays bare that the fiction has become a proxy for the marriage itself, and Jack recommits to the delusion. The couple's shared psychological unravelling accelerates toward the film's climax, in which the boundary between their invented world and reality collapses entirely, gesturing toward horror as the romantic myth of the rural escape curdles into something far darker.

Sources: The Conversation, The Scoop, IMDb (search metadata), Letterboxd (search metadata)