Alphabet Lane

Jack and Anna have moved to the country for a new job and o find a more authentic way of life. There, an innocent inside joke begins to take on a life of its own.

Anna (Tilda Cobham-Harvey) and Jack (Nicholas Denton) have been together long enough to know each other's rhythms and vulnerabilities by heart. Living in regional New South Wales, their days drift by in quiet repetition, shaped by a growing sense of disconnection from those around them and from each other.

When Jack casually invents a new friend named "Joe," Anna instinctively joins in on the fiction. What begins as an inside joke soon becomes an elaborate shared performance, a way of filling silences and testing boundaries. As "Joe" takes on a life of his own, the line between intimacy, fantasy and control begins to blur, and the game grows increasingly difficult to walk back — building toward something far more unsettling.

Curator’s note
Featuring finely observed performances from Tilda Cobham-Harvey and Nicholas Denton, Alphabet Lane gradually shifts from offbeat relationship drama into something far more disquieting, building toward a final act charged with unease and lingering menace.

Beautifully scored by Mark Bradshaw (You Won't Be Alone) the film features the soft and eerie humming of actors Ben Whishaw (Bright Star, Brideshead Revisited) and Alice Englert (Ginger & Rosa, Exposure). Together, these elements make Alphabet Lane an assured and atmospheric feature debut from director James Litchfield, quietly unravelling the loneliness and unspoken fractures within a relationship.