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.

Country romance or rural terror?

The Australian outback is a common source of romantic ideals – recalling the freedom of the drover and the more modern “tree-change” – but also of sublime terror, in which the seemingly endless landscape and the creatures it harbours are of equal threat.

Early works of Australian Gothic, such as Barbara Baynton’s short story The Chosen Vessel (1896) and Henry Lawson’s story The Drover’s Wife (1892), often combined these tropes, recognising the peril inherent even in the romantic figure of the drover.

Similarly to these classics of the genre, Alphabet Lane makes use of both perceptions to offer a unique take on the loneliness and fear of the........

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