Alphabet Lane review: a surprising Aussie thriller about love and loneliness in the outback

Tilda Cobham-Hervey knows what it means to make a splash with your first film. Maybe that’s why debut directors keep popping up on the Adelaide-born talent’s resume.

When 52 Tuesdays, Sophie Hyde’s first feature drama, kicked off Cobham-Hervey’s acting career in 2013, it commenced a trend. With On One Eyed Girl, Girl Asleep, Hotel Mumbai, Burn, I Am Woman and Flinch, too, she has worked with several filmmakers helming either their first full-length movies or their maiden fictional features – and does so again on Alphabet Lane from writer/director James Litchfield.

Alphabet Lane shares an opening setup with fellow recent Australian movies In Vitro and Together, neither of which Cobham-Hervey starred in but which both hail from big-screen debutants themselves. In these 2025 cinema releases – and in the ambitious and beguiling Alphabet Lane – a couple’s life off the beaten track proves far from blissful, testing their relationship.

Another great Tilda Cobham-Hervey performance

For Anna (Cobham-Hervey) and her partner Jack (Talamasca: The Secret Order’s Nicholas Denton, also excellent here), relocating to the country is supposed to be a rewarding, energising tree change. Instead, it lays bare how lonely and isolated adult life can be.

Litchfield begins Alphabet Lane with Anna clearly struggling, and with Jack far more comfortable in their shift from Sydney, even if the locals that he keeps attempting to befriend are either taciturn or merely polite rather than chummy.

It doesn’t help that at home, the couple mostly pass like ships in the night. She’s an ER doctor who works evenings, while he’s donning high-vis by day as an engineer.

Across a career that has also spanned TV’s Barracuda, The Kettering Incident, Fucking Adelaide, The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart and Apple Cider Vinegar, Cobham-Hervey has always been an innately and intelligently expressive performer, including in silence. With her eyes alone, she can tell an entire story and make its emotions swell.

Indeed, to watch her as Anna early in Alphabet Lane is to understand how it feels to chase a dream, be it your own or in support of a loved one, only to discover a desolate reality and believe you’re wholly alone in that truth.

Finding new friends in unlikely places

Farmer Joe and his wife Michelle just might be the solution to Anna and Jack’s seclusion – except for the fact that this older duo is completely fictitious.

When Cobham-Hervey’s eyes start sparkling, they help sell Anna and Jack’s leap into a world of pretend. It’s seemingly the only way they can think of to add a dash of connection, beyond their jobs and each other, to their new remote existence.

First, Jack advises that he’s made a friend. Anna joins in, expanding upon his story by inventing a spouse for the new pal. Soon they’re each penning letters back and forth as Joe and Michelle.

Every couple has in-jokes, but Litchfield uses the internal realm of relationships, inside tales and gags and all, to give his characters the outlet they’re yearning for and to unpack how removed from anything tangible they feel.

Such insular terrain can be tricky to bring to the screen, and to give not just an authentic but a lived-in air and texture. No couple’s inner world resembles another, after all. It’s no small feat for Alphabet Lane’s core trio of Litchfield, Cobham-Hervey and Denton, then, that the interior of Anna and Jack’s complicated love resonates with the real and the raw.

Watch the trailer

Diving into an inner world

For much of its 80 minutes, Alphabet Lane is a patient and quiet film, still like a moment frozen in time and hushed like a whispered secret. This suits and reflects its central relationship, which is engaged in overcoming the arrested development wrought by a literal move – and one that was intended as a push forward, conjuring up something new and clandestine that belongs solely to Anna and Jack.

With understanding and empathy, Litchfield, with cinematographer Grégoire Lière (Jones Family Christmas) and editor Paul Rowe (Voices in Deep), allows beats to linger.

It equally ensures that the scenic sights of the New South Wales countryside emphasise the distance – from everything left behind, from their former senses of selves, and from each other – that now dictates Anna and Jack’s days and feelings.

The landscape is as tinted by loneliness as the hues of grass and farmland. The fact that there’s often a vast chasm between how something appears and what it really is stares back at audiences.

Viewers see the picturesque and the pastoral. The town’s newcomers, Anna especially, can only spy everything that they think they’re missing.

A canny tonal balance

How difficult it can be to make friends as an adult is rarely discussed, either on the screen or beyond it, but it’s an important topic. However, just like Anna and Jack, Litchfield’s film is playful, even as it confronts a vital and weighty subject.

Alphabet Lane’s characters embrace pretence to say what they truly mean and to claim the connection they need; the movie itself turns tone almost into a game, juggling thriller elements – without ever becoming yet another Aussie rural horror – with dark comedy, the surreal and the creative, and also romance.

The result? The type of bold swing that perhaps only a first-time filmmaker would take, and a picture that could’ve proven cloying and overly quirky if the right balance wasn’t struck and the perfect actors hadn’t been found for its largely two-hander scenario.

Cobham-Hervey has since turned into a debut feature director herself with It’s All Going Very Well…, which is currently in post-production (after shorts A Field Guide to Being a 12-Year-Old Girl and Roborovski). As an actor who frequently graces the frames of helming newcomers, she’s essential to and an illuminating anchor for Alphabet Lane.

Alphabet Lane is in cinemas 23 April.

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