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.
