If cinema is a two-way conversation, what happens when you add imaginary friends to the chat?
Married couple Anna and Jack are feeling lonely and isolated out in the country, where they struggle to communicate with each other. Words are hard to come by when you’re only ever talking to your spouse. Silence and sex have replaced the twenty-six letters of the alphabet for them.
Then Jack invents an imaginary friend named Joe, before Anna joins in and creates Joe’s wife, Michelle. What begins as a joke soon turns into an exchange of letters, allowing Anna and Jack to communicate through their imaginary friends. Sometimes funny, sometimes dangerous and dark, their exchange of letters makes the film the horror equivalent of You’ve Got Mail.
The idea for Alphabet Lane came during COVID and was shot in just 17 days. Audiences can feel that intensity on screen as the couple’s imaginary world begins to take over their relationship. Lines are crossed, there’s an affair with an imaginary lover, and four plates are around the dinner table despite there being only two real people there to eat.
Australian actors Tilda Cobham-Hervey and Nicholas Denton, who play the troubled couple, are in excellent form. They’ve got a distinct Nick and Amy Dunne air about them, from Gone Girl. They’re both the problem to each other’s solution. Their love’s alive so long as Joe and Michelle are! They stay married with a little help from their friends.
The film’s sound echoes tension and sadness. A low howl lingers in the background, while the sudden changes in tone and atmosphere often follow moments of warmth between the couple, creating an unsettling contrast for the audience.
There’s a particularly disturbing scene in the couple’s home, where Anna drops all the pretense of the illusion. She sits at their table writing a letter to Jack from Michelle, right in front of him, while he simply watches on. As does the audience.
What starts as a joke between Anna and Jack has become something much more serious.
And what makes a good joke? You don’t explain it.
Alphabet Lane knows you’ll get it.
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