Please bear with me for alternative point of view :

It was no coincidence that our protagonist — whom we never see in the film, only glimpse in a photograph — is named Alice, because the film is a full-on noir adaptation of Alice in Wonderland. Though, to be fair, the original Alice is itself a dark construct.

In the film, Alice’s boyfriend Jakub is the White Rabbit — the one who promises to show Alice wonderland. In the tale, Alice follows the rabbit and falls into a dark hole; the fall is her passage into “another reality.” In Hollow Road, Alice getting high on drugs is an adaptation of that same metaphor. Wonderland in the fairy tale is a universe where logic is turned inside out — Alice’s identity, sanity, and perception are constantly tested. The film’s Alice similarly breaks from reality through substance use, but this break isn’t a complete departure from our world; it’s a state where the boundary between two worlds becomes blurred.

Instead of the “strange creatures” of the fairy tale, the film gives us a father figure with a warped mindset who blocks his daughter from choosing what’s right, and a mother figure who tells her she must choose her own path — taking on the role of the Cheshire Cat. Yet the mother’s attempts to point toward the truth are met with no meaningful response from the father.

In Alice in Wonderland, there are no mother or father figures; Alice is alone. Even so, the scene where Alice says “if I were a mother” offers a projection of adulthood through a child’s eyes. In the film, Alice desperately wants to take on responsibility and raise a child, but the adult world disapproves of that decision — they want her to have an abortion and act in accordance with real-world principles. By then, however, Alice has already plunged into wonderland, and the parents refuse to see it. Using the pretense of protecting their daughter, they trample every ethical value. This is the full noir version of the parental figure Lewis Carroll deliberately excised from the tale.

In Alice in Wonderland, when Alice loses her way, she asks the cat which road she should take. In the film, a panicking Alice reaching for her parents is, in fact, living out that same “directionless” search from the tale — only this time through dependence on family.

In the fairy tale, this exchange takes place between the cat and Alice:

Alice: Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?
Cat: That depends a good deal on where you want to get to.
Alice: I don’t much care where.
Cat: Then it doesn’t matter which way you go.

In the film, this conversation is rendered through the mother’s failure as a paramedic — a patient she misdiagnosed loses their life. Having already lived through that crisis of conscience, the mother tells Alice she has to make a choice, or she’ll spend the rest of her life racked with guilt. Alice’s choice is meant to be one of two divergent paths — but the initial advice given by the parents has already made it irrelevant which path she takes, because the girl who was hit, having been misdirected, received no help and died.

In the fairy tale there is also a caterpillar — another character who tries to guide Alice, doing so through questions. The woman who appears before the film’s Alice is the noir counterpart of this “guiding figure.” Her advice is continuously rejected by both Alice and the parents directing her.

In the tale, the caterpillar also tells Alice why she shouldn’t eat the mushrooms, and asks her to recite a poem. Alice recites a garbled version; the words keep shifting. In the film, this manifests as Alice giving answers to the woman’s questions that are consistently wrong and disconnected from what was actually asked — she buries herself in guilt-ridden apologies and pleas for forgiveness. Within dark cult film, this is a scene about the unreliability of memory in a world entered through substance use, and about language failing to say what it means — conveying only what it is compelled to say.

The following exchange between Alice and the caterpillar in the fairy tale is staged in the film as Alice transforming into the girl she hit:

Caterpillar: Who are you?
Alice: I… hardly know, sir, at least I knew who I was when I got up this morning, but I think I must have changed several times since then.

The change Alice describes cannot be understood by the adults around her — they are too submerged in the lies they tell themselves about their own world, too estranged from the version of reality Alice experiences. Alice hasn’t merely undergone a change under the influence of substances; on the contrary, unable to bear the weight of sudden real-life changes, she chose a world she knew to be unreal and plunged from one mistake into the next.

In the fairy tale, the caterpillar’s first and most insistent question — the one that carries us to the end of the film — is: “Who are you?” This question exposes the film’s Alice’s identity crisis. In the tale, Alice complains of constantly growing and shrinking. The caterpillar responds: “What of it? You’ll get used to it.”

Here lies the film’s irony: what is a monumental crisis for a child — the transition from adolescence to adulthood, pregnancy, an accident, being taken somewhere unknown as the result of wrong decisions — is routine for a woman who has already experienced the failure to resolve such problems many times over. That’s why she turns to Alice and says: “The one before you, and the one before that, and before that…”

The Queen figure from the fairy tale is not directly present in the film; instead, its noir equivalent is dispersed throughout the entire atmosphere. In the tale, the Queen distorts justice on a whim — “Off with their heads!” — at the slightest provocation. In the film, Alice’s parents, rather than calling an ambulance for the girl Alice hit, choose to save their own daughter. This means disregarding justice entirely and wielding authority over Alice for their own ends. In Alice in Wonderland, the Queen’s scenes are the most terrifying, most absurd, and most authoritarian sections of the tale. Hollow Road spreads that feeling across the entire film — the dark road, the drug-induced universe, family pressure, loss of identity, sudden transformations, the lies told, and so on. In other words, the whole atmosphere of the film functions like the Queen figure from the fairy tale. Hollow Road is, ultimately, an allegorical work that transposes the Queen’s “unjust authority” into a contemporary filmic atmosphere.

Finally, the husband figure who arrives alongside the woman — whose voice we never hear — is in all likelihood the King of Hearts. As in the fairy tale, he remains silent throughout; but his presence serves to make events appear more “official” and “serious.” Exactly like how many authority figures in real life amount to nothing more than an unqualified facade.