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‘The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart’ Review: The Right Kind of Melodrama

Sigourney Weaver stars in an Australian family thriller full of stormy emotions and strangely beautiful terrain.

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By Mike Hale

The title of the new Amazon offering “The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart,” with its echo of V.C. Andrews’s Gothic novels of family calamity, is a case of truth in advertising. The seven-episode Australian mini-series, which is based on the novel by Holly Ringland and premiered Thursday on Prime Video, is an unapologetic melodrama — a family saga in which lies and secrets proliferate beyond all reason, putting parents and children, friends and bystanders, through unnaturally intense storms of emotion.

That it’s also entertaining, moving and vividly atmospheric is a pleasant surprise in a time when melodrama tends toward the banal (some variety of soap opera) or the scolding (some variety of humorless social critique). “Lost Flowers” is a reminder that when it is handled with skill, sophistication and a measure of restraint, melodrama can be as satisfying as any other style of storytelling.

The story involves a complicated web of relationships centering on Thornfield, a flower farm that doubles as a refuge for troubled women, who are called “flowers.” Some of the women, though not all of them, are escaping abusive men. The farm is run by a forbidding matriarch, June (Sigourney Weaver), with the help of her Indigenous lover, Twig (Leah Purcell), and their adopted daughter, Candy (Frankie Adams).

June is one pole of a story in which the keeping of shameful family secrets is the foundation of tragedy. The other pole is Alice, who is a child when we first see her (played by Alyla Browne) and knows nothing about June, her grandmother. Savage events unite them early on so that they can spend the rest of the series being drawn together and, as Alice works her way through June’s lies, torn apart again.

Most of the first half of “Lost Flowers” is tied to the point of view of this young Alice, and the director and cinematographer, Glendyn Ivin and Sam Chiplin, give these episodes the seductive texture of an ominous, doom-tinged fairy tale. Using the strangely beautiful landscape of the New South Wales coast, they create an ambience that reflects Alice’s childlike, wavering apprehension of the unreasoning violence that regularly bursts into her life.

They are helped immensely by Browne, who gives a terrific performance even though Alice spends several episodes mostly mute while recovering from trauma. Sadness, rebelliousness and a puckish sense of humor are there in her eyes. Though she shares the screen with Weaver and with the Australian star Asher Keddie, who plays a sympathetic but self-righteous local librarian, Browne draws you right to her.

Midway through, the series jumps ahead more than a decade, and Alice, now a young woman played by Alycia Debnam-Carey, finds herself in another magical setting — this time a national park where a volcanic crater provides a haven for wildflowers.

The change of scenery is symbolic — away from the protection of the farm, Alice is free both to find herself and to start repeating harmful family patterns when it comes to men. And the writing, led by the series’s showrunner, Sarah Lambert, dries out a little along with the landscape. These episodes feel more like something we’ve seen before, though a bit of the earlier enchantment lingers in a plot strand involving Twig’s long road trip in search of Alice.

What carries you through, finally — as you might expect — is Weaver. “Lost Flowers” doesn’t play to her traditional strengths — the taciturn, bottled-up June doesn’t provide much of a canvas for Weaver’s regal-yet-feral intelligence or her deadly sense of humor. She can get more out of sheer presence and stubborn charisma, however, than most performers do from busily acting, and in the later episodes she takes over, carrying off some wonderful moments as June slows down and opens up. Weaver’s work in series has been sparse and unpredictable; getting to spend seven episodes with her is the icing on the melodrama.

An earlier version of this review misidentified the given name of the character played by Sigourney Weaver in “The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart.” It is June, not Jane.

An earlier version of this review misstated the name of the flower farm at the center of the story. It is Thornfield, not Thornhill.

How we handle corrections

Mike Hale is a television critic. He also writes about online video, film and media. He came to The Times in 1995 and worked as an editor in Sports, Arts & Leisure and Weekend Arts before becoming a critic in 2009. More about Mike Hale

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The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart review – Sigourney Weaver is on blazing form

This thickly portentous novel adaptation is gorgeously shot, and perfectly captures the threat of violence that men can represent to women. Shame it has the odd teeth-itching moment …

I ’m glad I’m not a prestigious limited TV drama. It looks exhausting. Such is the faint but persistent feeling that comes with watching The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart (the slightly laborious title being the perfect foreshadow of the entire experience). It is good – it is – but, crikey, you can feel every ounce of effort that has gone into making it so.

Every scene is gorgeously shot and dripping with meaning, rife with Symbolism-with-a-capital-S, suffused with evocations of memories and studded with seeds of future plotlines. It is a story built around secrets and you can hardly move for hints. But once you get used to this thickly portentous vibe, there is plenty to admire.

Based on Holly Ringland’s bestselling book of the same name, this is a tale of the enduring suffering caused by male violence against women, and the manifold ways men harm. One of the things it gets absolutely right, and for which it abandons its slightly blurry feel and pulls everything into sharp focus, is how it shows threat, the ever-present fear of violence erupting even at ostensibly happy moments, and the terrible injury when it does. The Lost Flowers shows domestic abuse to be the terrorism that it is.

We begin with eponymous nine-year-old Alice (Alyla Browne) dreaming of setting her father, Clem, on fire and freeing her family. Her mother, Agnes, is pregnant for a second time and running away has become an even fainter hope than before. When Alice accidentally starts a fire in Clem’s woodshed, it spreads to the house and kills both her parents. Local librarian Sally (Asher Keddie), who had been the first to alert authorities to the possibility that the child and her mother were being abused, wants to take her in. But Alice, mute with trauma, is put into the care of her formidable grandmother, June, played by Sigourney Weaver in a rare sighting outside the Avatar franchise, and who is on quietly blazing form.

June owns and runs a flower farm that secretly doubles as a refuge for women (known as “the Flowers”, which is one of a few teeth-itching moments – including Clem being a super-talented sculptor who left a trail of beautiful wood carvings wherever he went – that you’re just going to have to learn to live with, I’m afraid). It is in the history of June and the farm that most of the secrets lie. Privy to most of them is her partner Twig (Leah Purcell) and Candy Blue (Frankie Adams), who was taken in by the women as a baby.

Gradually Alice settles at the farm and once she has been surrounded by – cover your teeth again – the healing power of the Flowers for long enough, recovers her voice. She is protected over the years from the outside world, as they all are, by June, her shotgun and her willingness to let the ex-husbands who find the refuge beat her up so that she can report them to the police and have them locked up. It’s a risky strategy and requires the viewer to suspend some questions about the efficacy of Australia’s justice system, but it does allow an extra thread of questions about guilt, expiation and redemption to be wound around the increasingly complex figure of June.

About halfway through the series, we leap forward in time (in an otherwise exceptionally languorously paced endeavour) to Alice in her early 20s (now played by Alycia Debnam-Carey) getting her first job and her first proper boyfriend. This unleashes a whole new raft of questions, about whether we can ever really outrun our pasts, escape our traumas and break patterns imprinted on us before we can consciously reject them.

The twists and turns, though far more stately and measured than in an outright thriller, are plentiful enough to keep you hooked. What is missing, however, is any real sense of the characters involved, or their relationships to each other. What should be a closeknit sisterhood is instead a collection of individuals defined by and detached from each other by their secrets, guilt or other internal damage. The Flowers are ciphers, not flesh and blood women, which feels like an awful waste. Even the protagonists – June, both Alices, Twig and Sally – never feel fully formed, despite deeply committed and excellent performances.

There are also some plot points that are more noticeably glossed over than others. We learn that Twig’s children were taken from her by social services, for example, but nothing is made of the fact that she is an Indigenous woman and that this experience resonates with Australian history in a specific and terrible way.

The Lost Flowers feels like a careful arrangement tied with the right ribbon and delivered with the best intentions. But you might prefer a few living blooms instead.

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The Ending Of The Lost Flowers Of Alice Hart Book, Explained

Holly Ringland’s best-selling novel is now a Prime Video series.

Spoilers ahead for The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart. Holly Ringland’s best-selling novel, The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart , begins with the titular character having a dark vision. “I knew when I read the first page about a nine-year-old Alice Hart sitting at the end of a laneway dreaming of ways to set her father on fire, that I had to bring this to the screen,” Sarah Lambert, who adapted the book for Prime Video’s new series of the same name, recently explained to Harper’s Bazaar . “It was one of the best opening lines I had ever read.”

Starring Sigourney Weaver and Alycia Debnam-Carey, the first three episodes of the seven-part drama series, which premiere on Aug. 4., adhere to the book’s general arc and are dedicated to Alice’s upbringing in Australia. The second half, which focuses on events from Alice’s twenties, drops in weekly installments until the Sept. 1 finale. According to Ringland’s website, 9-year-old Alice Hart lives in isolation by the sea with her flower-loving mother, Agnes, and her abusive father, Clem. Agnes, who is expecting another child, plans on leaving her husband, but she never follows through, while Alice has visions of setting Clem ablaze. One day, a fire at the family home results in both parents’ deaths, and afterward, Alice’s paternal grandmother, June — a flower farmer who raises Alice on “the language of Australian native flowers, a way to say the things that are too hard to speak” — takes her in.

Alice settles with June and the other women (aka “flowers”) who are abuse survivors, but as she grows up, she becomes increasingly frustrated by the secrecy shrouding her family history. In her early twenties, Alice’s life is “thrown into upheaval again when she suffers devastating betrayal and loss.” Among the painful revelations she overhears one night included that June had her love Oggi deported back to Bulgaria to “save” Alice from a stolen future and broken heart. Desperate to outrun grief, Alice flees to the central Australian desert where she meets a charismatic and ultimately dangerous man named Dylan.

Meanwhile, June dies of a heart attack while waiting for Alice to come home, but leaves her granddaughter the Thornfield dictionary in her will. Longtime residents Candy and Twig explain to Alice that June had seen how possessive and aggressive Clem had been to her mother and the other women, and decided not to leave the family farm to him. That’s why he left Thornfield with her mother, vowing never to speak to June again. What’s more, they reveal that Alice’s brother was born prematurely but survived the fire, decades earlier. However, June left him behind at the hospital because she worried about caring for a sick newborn and didn’t want to put Alice through more grief if he didn’t survive.

Eventually, Alice travels back home to find the local librarian, Sally Morgan, whom her mother named as guardian, should June “not be fit” to raise her children. Sally explains that she fell in love with and had an affair with Clem when she was 18, resulting in the birth of their daughter, Gillian (aka Gilly), who died from leukemia when she was five years old. Though Sally had sent her letters over the years, June did not want Alice to have any contact with her or her brother, Charlie, who was almost 20 years old at that point.

After meeting Charlie, Alice later takes him to Thornfield, where she can’t imagine life without him. In the end, Alice learns that “the most powerful story she will ever possess is her own.”

This article was originally published on Aug. 4, 2023

The Literary Edit

Review: The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart – Holly Ringland

I received a copy of The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart by Holly Ringland as part of the Luxuread subscription box I signed up for earlier in June.  It came with organic tea bags, and Belgium chocolates and bath salts, and so, when a storm swept its way across Sydney earlier last week, and brought with it looming skies and clattering rain, I used it as the perfect excuse to cosy up indoors with some uninterrupted reading time.

A story about fires and flowers and family ties, The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart is a compelling tale from its very first page, where we meet nine-year-old protagonist, Alice Hart, sitting at her desk and dreaming of ways in which she can set her father on fire. She lives an isolated life by the sea with her gentle mother, who talks to the flowers in her garden, and a violent, overbearing father who casts a spell of terror and fear over both his wife and daughter. When catastrophe visits the Hart family, Alice is taken inland to live with the grandmother she never knew she had, at Thornfield, a native flower farm. There Alice slowly comes to terms with her grief, and June vows not to make the same mistakes raising Alice, as she did raising her son – Alice’s father.

As the years pass at Thornfield, Alice embraces life at the flower farm, where she has learnt the language of native flowers just like all the women in her family that came before her. And then, on the night of a devastating storm, Alice uncovers a familial betrayal that she cannot forgive, and so abandons her life at Thornfield and flees to the central Australian desert. There she adopts a puppy, finds work as a national park ranger and immerses herself in a very different way of life to that which came before, but one in which she finally believes she’s found long and lasting happiness.

An enchanting read that explores theme of abuse, death and redemption that orbits against a backdrop of native Australian wildlife, The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart has all the ingredients for a spellbinding tale; and absorbs its reader until the very final page.

About The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart

After her family suffers a tragedy, nine-year-old Alice Hart is forced to leave her idyllic seaside home. She is taken in by her grandmother, June, a flower farmer who raises Alice on the language of Australian native flowers, a way to say the things that are too hard to speak.

Under the watchful eye of June and the women who run the farm, Alice settles, but grows up increasingly frustrated by how little she knows of her family’s story. In her early twenties, Alice’s life is thrown into upheaval again when she suffers devastating betrayal and loss. Desperate to outrun grief, Alice flees to the dramatically beautiful central Australian desert. In this otherworldly landscape Alice thinks she has found solace, until she meets a charismatic and ultimately dangerous man.

Spanning two decades, set between sugar cane fields by the sea, a native Australian flower farm, and a celestial crater in the central desert,  The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart  follows Alice’s unforgettable journey, as she learns that the most powerful story she will ever possess is her own.

About Holly Ringland

Holly Ringland grew up wild and barefoot in her mother’s tropical garden in Northern Australia. When she was nine years old, her family lived in a camper van for two years in North America,travelling from one national park to another, an experience that sparked Holly’s lifelong interest in cultures and stories. In her twenties, Holly worked for four years in a remote Indigenous community in the central Australian desert. She moved to England in 2009 and obtained her MA in Creative Writing from the University of Manchester in 2011. She now lives between the UK and Australia. Holly’s essays and short fiction have been published in various anthologies and literary journals. In 2015, the first chapter of The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart won Griffith Review’s annual writer award, which included a week-long fellowship at Varuna House, Australia’s top national writing residency.

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1 comment on “Review: The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart – Holly Ringland”

Ooh sounds good! I am hanging out for my Luxuread box in July!!

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Mel Reviews Her Books

Book Review: ‘The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart’

Wow folks it’s been a hot minute! Where have you been Mel, you may ask? Well, it’s a busy time for bookselling and book recommendations! This makes me incredibly happy but it is also quite tiring, leaving me with limited time to write my regular book reviews. Things will slow down soon and uploading will become more regular – I promise 😉

So, a little while back (maybe 2-3 weeks ago), I finished The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart by Holly Ringland and honestly, I can absolutely see why this debut Australian novel caused a stir of positive discussion in its publication year of 2019. Additionally, I believe it is truely well worth the 2019 Australian Book Industry Award.

To begin with, a little disclaimer that this novel is strongly focused on the effects of domestic abuse and it’s long-lasting repercussions. Don’t let this put you off because it is a beautifully woven story.

Alice Hart is a young girl at the beginning of this novel. She is living on an isolated property with her whimsical, young and intelligent mother who speaks daily with love to her flowers. However her father has a consuming presence in her childhood, utilising narcissistic and abusive behaviours to control both Alice and her mother. Alice is aware of her mothers physical signs of abusive, yet it isn’t until she is on the receiving end of her father’s behavioural abuse does she realise that her childhood is not necessarily a happy one. Events occur and Alice uncovers a hidden secret of her fathers which ultimately leaves her as an orphan. Alice’s world then expands in ways she never knew possible.

Alice’s paternal Grandmother, June (a family member she never even knew existed), becomes her legal guardian. June takes Alice to live on her flower farm, Thornfield . Thornfield actually doubles as both a workplace and a safe house for women and children escaping domestic abuse. This environment of love, support and kindness is all new for Alice and quite hard to comprehend.

We continue to live through Alices’ experiences as a teenager and then as a young woman. Artistically and brilliantly, each chapter starts with an image and description of an Australian native flower. We learn to understand the language of flowers with Alice, where each flower comes from, how they look and what they mean. Without giving too much away, Alice soon becomes tangled up in her own abusive relationship. Interestingly and intelligently, Holly Ringland has peeled back the layers of emotional, mental, financial and physical abusive all in one novel. It is eye-opening, destroying and hard to put down. You want to throw the book across the room in exhausted anger but scavenge it to keep reading! As the reader, you yearn for Alice to see through the behaviours of her partner yet it is so explainable as to see why she doesn’t, creating the perfect depiction for domestic abuse. You’re a witness to her inside thoughts but you’re also weighing up the decisions she’s making from the outside as the reader. It is fantastically terrifying.

I think, if you can give yourself the time before the end of the year, read this book. Or if not, add it to your TBR for 2022. It will stay with you and make you become a full on advocate for exposing and supporting domestic abuse in Australia – maybe even around the world.

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A review of the Lost Flowers of Alice Hart by Holly Ringland

The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart by Holly Ringland HarperCollins (4 th  Estate) ISBN: 9781460754337, 19 March, 2018, 400 pages, $32.99aud

It’s impossible to write about The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart  without talking about how physically beautiful the book is. While it may be true that you can’t judge a book by its cover, this one is a striking William Morris style floral cover. The inside, with each chapter represented by a flower, beautifully drawn by botanical artist Edith Rewa, with titles designed to look handwritten. Somehow the book manages to be both lush and delicate, and the story is the same, peppered throughout with poetry, including the beautiful “Seed” by Ali Cobby Eckermann from My Mother’s Heart, as well as excerpts at the start of each section from Tennyson, Sappho, Emily Bronte, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Alice Hart is a compelling protagonist, beginning her story as a nine year old girl in a dangerous domestic violence situation, immediately clear from the purple bruise and split skin of her mother’s face: “The only signs she would need to read would be in the sky, rather than the shadows and clouds that passed over her father’s face, alerting her to whether he was a monster, to the man who turned a gum tree into a writing desk.” (6/7) Alice grows through this coming-of-age story, moving through the teen years and first love to independence at twenty six years as she attempts to come to terms with her violent upbringing and the disaster she has endured as well as the many secrets and gifts that underpin her life.

The story’s settings are richly depicted, from Alice’s original home amidst sugar cane and the ocean, to a native, inland flower farm/refuge to a national park in the Northern Territory where Alice obtains a job as a Ranger. The natural environment is as much a part of the characterisation as the people – with the ocean, the river, the red desert earth and the stunning sunsets:

Around them, the willowy needles of desert oak trees swayed in the pale orange light. Wafts of yellow butterflies fluttered low over acacia and mulga bushes.  The crater wall slowly change colour as the sun sank, from flat ochre to blazing red to chocolate-purple. The sun slipped under the dark line of the horizon, glowing like an ember as it threw its last light into the sky. (241/242)

There is a kind of magic that is woven through the book, primarily from the language of flowers that works in conjunction with the semantical story but has its own silent meaning.  Flannel flowers mean “what is lost is found”, Sturt’s Desert Peas, which are integral to the plot, mean “Have courage, take heart”, and Foxtails mean “Blood of my blood”.  These flowers become Alice’s language when words fail her. They work as subtext in conjunction with a range of other intertextual elements like the poems, the fairy tales that are referenced, and the stories from other cultures brought in via characters like young Alice’s Koori carer Twig, for whom Alice becomes a surrogate child, Alice’s Mexican friend Lulu, the Bulgarian fairy tales of Boryana, whose son becomes Alice’s first love, and the poet, artist, law woman and senior ranger Ruby, who teaches Alice the story of the heart garden, and about the power of story to heal:

Ruby stood on her patio in the setting sun, watching rainbows catch in the spray while she watered her pot pants.  The mineral-rich smell of the damp red dirt took her straight to the memory of her mother and aunties, like a song.  The sky gathered a palette of pink clay, ochre and grey stone. (259)

Though the story moves quickly, carried mostly by Alice’s attempts to escape her past, the writing itself is continuously poetic, filtered through the prism of Alice’s point of view. The writing remains beautiful, even when describing the most appalling abuse, as when Alice’s father pushes her off a boat into the ocean for missing a command to hula at a passing stranger:

The pressure on her back was firm and quick. She pitched forward into the cold sea, crying out a she was engulfed by waves. Spluttering to the surface, she shrieked and coughed, trying to hack up the burning sensation of salt water in her lungs. Kicking hard, she held her arms up the way her mother taught her to do if she eve got caught in a rip.  Not too far away, her father coasted on the board, staring at her, his face as white as the caps on the waves.  (32)

There are many themes running through this book, but the most prevalent is power of books and language – not just words – to heal.  For Alice, books open up her world and provide her with a key to finding herself. Male violence crackles through the book and moves like a malevolent force, forming a parallel line from Alice’s father to her later male relationships.  Though Clem and Dylan are unequivocally bad, Ringland crafts them with sympathy, focusing more on the critical importance of support networks like female friendships to change negative patterns and create healing and awareness. In spite of all the loveliness, The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart is not a meek book. The story travels into dark places, and sheds light on a very serious and significant subject with grace and beauty.

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Australian Masterpiece: The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart by Holly Ringland

The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart opens with 9-year-old Alice Hart dreaming of ways to set her father on fire. The desk where she sits is made of eucalyptus and superbly crafted by him. But the same man who lovingly creates beautiful objects, is also the monster whose ‘blue eyes turn black with rage.’ A man easy with his fists, capable of throwing a puppy against the side of a washing machine and of doing much worse to his pregnant wife and daughter.

Estranged from her son, Clem, Alice’s father, June has her own demons to wrestle with. Although brusque, almost sharp at times, inside June is hurting, wracked with guilt over all that’s happened. She drinks. Her one great hope is that the flower farm that has been her salve, will eventually become Alice’s, not only as a sanctuary from the past but as a place to heal and grow strong.

But Alice is in a bad place. Missing her idyllic seaside home, surrounded by total strangers, haunted by horrible nightmares and prone to anxiety attacks. Two sources of comfort come in the shape of June’s dog, the lovely Harry, who seems to take it upon himself to befriend and support Alice and infinitely wise Twig, June’s right hand at the farm.

Twig (stern and resolute ): ‘If anything, she(Alice), deserves more. From You. From us. From this place. She’s your family’.

‘She’s his,’ June retorted. ‘She’s his, and I don’t want to care.’

‘Good luck with that,’ Twig said, her voice softening.’

Holly Ringland grew up wild and barefoot in her mother’s tropical garden and it shows. She is a sensual writer whose lush descriptions, takes you into the landscape, to the smells, the sights, into the very air around the characters. ‘ Outside the wind tore the petals off her mother’s white roses and scattered them across the yard like fallen stars.’  

And this scene: At first light, June rose from bed, slid her feet into her Blundstones and went silently through the house to the back door. Outside, the world was cool and blue. She held herself in it, breathing it in. She hadn’t slept well, not even after draining her flask of whisky. As the sky lightened…she collected clippers and a basket before making her way through the fields toward the native flower greenhouses. The morning was filled with the low drone of bees and occasional magpie song.

Inside the greenhouse was rich and damp.’

Ringland’s poetic descriptions of the elements, is matched by the haunting, lyrical power of her writing to inject authentic, raw emotion. The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart is on the one hand a simple story about a young girl with an abusive father and a withdrawn, embittered grandmother. But into this family drama seeps lots of other interesting themes including the healing power of nature, the dark aftermath of trauma and the cyclical nature of violence.

It also addresses one of those confounding questions of human existence – how to break the patterns of the past, live on your own terms and find your own strength?

The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart arrived with a huge build-up. It is the Australian debut novel everyone has been talking about. ‘International publishing sensation, sold to seventeen territories’ shouts the proud publishers. And there’s the great endorsements from revered authors and the rave reviews. The bar couldn’t be raised any higher.

But does it meet expectations? Yes, yes and YES, it does.

About The Author

Holly Ringland grew up wild and barefoot in her mother’s tropical garden in Northern Australia. When she was nine years old, her family lived in a camper van for two years in North America,travelling from one national park to another, an experience that sparked Holly’s lifelong interest in cultures and stories.

In her twenties, Holly worked for four years in a remote Indigenous community in the central Australian desert. She moved to England in 2009 and obtained her MA in Creative Writing from the University of Manchester in 2011. She now lives between the UK and Australia.

Holly’s essays and short fiction have been published in various anthologies and literary journals. In 2015, the first chapter of The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart won Griffith Review’s annual writer award, which included a week-long fellowship at Varuna House, Australia’s top national writing residency.

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You don’t need to know that Prime Video’s seven-part mini-series “The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart” is based on a book to sense it. With a narrative that sprawls over years and ties various traumas and their associated grief into complex character beats, it’s the kind of thing that clearly worked on the page. That’s why Holly Ringland ’s novel of the same name became an international hit, attracting one of our best-living actresses to director Glendyn Ivin and creator Sarah Lambert's adaptation. Inconsistent Australian accent aside, Sigourney Weaver ’s work here is among the best of her luminous career, tackling a challenging role with subtlety and grace. There are times when the pace of “Alice Hart” can be glacial, but it’s worth being patient with its early chapters, which set the stage for a study of generational loss and the horrible mistakes people make in protecting loved ones.

Introduced as a child, Alice Hart (Alyla Brown) lives in a state of constant threat at the hands of her abusive father, Clem ( Charlie Vickers ). She adores her mother, Agnes ( Tilda Cobham-Hervey ), who is captured almost as a mythical creature in the early chapters in how a child can view an adult they want to save. Mom can’t be human. She must be a selkie who can escape this horror. When Alice wanders into town one day, she catches the attention of a librarian named Sally ( Asher Keddie ), setting in motion a sequence of events that will lead to the death of Agnes and Clem, forcing Alice to go live with her grandmother June (Sigourney Weaver) on a flower farm called Thornfield that’s actually a women’s shelter. At first, Alice doesn’t speak, but the other residents of the farm, particularly Candy ( Frankie Adams ) and June’s partner Twig ( Leah Purcell ), help her recover.

June Hart is a fascinating character, a distant, cold woman who seems almost put out by having Alice around even though she fights with Sally for custody of the child. The narrative jumps halfway through the season to Alice as a young adult (now played excellently by Alycia Debnam-Carey), and several decisions that June made in that time-leap come to the fore, which she thought were protecting Alice but at a great cost. The final stretch of the season also gives June a disease, which seems manipulative at first, but allows Weaver some of the richest dramatic material of her career as she comes to terms with the choices she made, the traumas that shaped her, and how both planted the seeds for Alice’s lost flowers.

“The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart” is clearly a melodrama, but Ivin centers character and setting over manipulative plotting in its best chapters. He alternates shots that linger on minor details with gorgeous shots of the Australian landscape from cinematographer Sam Chiplin , set to a moody, effective score by Hania Rani . It’s a remarkably well-made piece of adult drama, even if the pace undeniably drags at times. In the era of “Everything is the Wrong Length,” it truly does feel like there’s a great 130-minute-or-so movie in this story. But that version would admittedly lose the show’s accumulation of small joys and how the writers let these excellent performers live in these roles instead of just running in and out of the spotlight.

That lived-in sense really anchors the work of Debnam-Carey, who viewers feel like they know by the time she’s stuck with the very-wrong guy after running away from Thornfield. The final episode forces too many revelations on Alice via exposition dumps and flashbacks, but the young actress sells every response as genuine. Along with Weaver, she grounds the piece in a way that can’t be undervalued, never allowing her key role to spin off into soapy melodrama. The residents of Thornfield learn to communicate with flowers instead of words, and the show is arguably at its best when it’s saying less with actual language, letting an emotional stare or heartfelt hug convey all that needs to be said and all that can someday be found.

The whole series was screened for review. "The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart" is on Prime Video now.

Brian Tallerico

Brian Tallerico is the Managing Editor of RogerEbert.com, and also covers television, film, Blu-ray, and video games. He is also a writer for Vulture, The Playlist, The New York Times, and GQ, and the President of the Chicago Film Critics Association.

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Film credits.

The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart (2023)

420 minutes

Sigourney Weaver as June Hart

Alycia Debnam Carey as Alice Hart

Asher Keddie as Sally

Leah Purcell as Twig

Frankie Adams as Candy

Charlie Vickers as Clem

Alexander England as John

Tilda Cobham-Hervey as Agnes

• Glendyn Ivin

Writer (based on the book by)

• Holly Ringland

Writer (created for television by)

• Sarah Lambert
• Kirsty Fisher

Cinematographer

• Sam Chiplin
• Dany Cooper
• Deborah Peart

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‘The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart’ review: In this moving drama, mysteries abound

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Bad communication is a staple of television: Omitted facts, half-truths, outright lies and genuine misunderstandings — genuine, that is, except in the sense that a writer has forced them upon the characters in order to complicate their lives — power dramas and comedies alike. My own quixotic desire for programs where people say what they ought to say when they ought to say it is, from a dramatic standpoint, of course completely wrongheaded. That doesn’t stop me from shouting at the screen when characters refuse to speak up or tell the truth. Honesty, as all these shows demonstrate by negative example, is the best policy.

“The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart,” a new miniseries ( imported from Australia , based on a novel by Holly Ringland, starring Sigourney Weaver and beginning Friday on Prime Video), is a cavalcade of kept secrets, withheld information, misrepresentations and action arranged so that the reveals keep on coming, throughout its slow-moving seven-episode length. The series, which is sensitively written, expertly performed by actors young and old, and beautifully shot — if you cut out the people, it might serve as a promotion for the Australian tourist board — is in no rush to give up its mysteries, and by drawing out the drama, what’s obvious in the story comes off as proportionally more subtle. The mood is melancholic, redoubled by long, drawn-out notes from the strings and minor-key piano arpeggios; passages of happiness feel fragile, fleeting, untrustworthy. In the end, though — or perhaps because — it does not spare the melodrama, I found it quite moving.

If lies, omissions, etc., are more than usually at the center of things, with characters not being exactly who they are or even think they are, the actual subject of “Alice Hart” is trauma and the lasting (but not unconquerable) effects of domestic violence — which one feels in the air from its first, deceptively yet suspiciously idyllic opening scenes. We begin with Clem (Charlie Vickers), wife Agnes (Tilda Cobham-Hervey), who is pregnant, and their 9-year-old daughter, Alice (Alyla Browne), living in what looks like happy, picturesque, bucolic isolation. Until the bruises start to show.

Alice, who seems to have no other human contact, likes books (the power of stories is a repeating theme of the series, which likes a fairy-tale trope, and whose themes and metaphors are never less than explicit), and one rare day when her parents are both gone, she walks barefoot into town and into the library — a place her mother has promised but never managed to take her. Librarian Sally (Asher Keddie) notices the bruises, and Alice, noticing her noticing, takes off, as Sally gets on the phone to the police, in the person of her husband, John (Alexander England). Back home, Alice investigates the shed where Clem carves lifelike wooden sculptures, accidentally starts a fire and runs back to the house as her parents return.

We jump ahead a little in time — leaving space for a mystery, though, as with much of the series, a mystery one might work out before the characters do — as a bigger fire is consuming the house, Clem is dead, and Agnes, not long for this world, and Alice, both beaten and broken, are being carried away on stretchers.

Enter Weaver as Alice’s grandmother, June, whom Alice — recovering but refusing or unable to speak — has never met, but who has determined, over Sally’s strenuous objections, to carry her off to Thornfield, a vast flower farm that doubles as a sanctuary for abused women, a place “where wildflowers are allowed to bloom.” Here we meet June’s wife, Twig (Leah Purcell), and their adult adopted daughter, Candy (Frankie Adams), found in the bulrushes, like Moses.

Flowers — they’re in the title, notice — exist here both as metaphors and things in themselves. The women are called Flowers; there is, working in the other main metaphor, a literal book of flowers, full of botanical drawings, each variety with its own special meaning — “it’s our very own secret language” — like Ophelia’s rosemary for remembrance and pansies for thoughts. (Continuing that thread, there is a river on the grounds, with somewhat ominous associations.) It’s significant that Clem cuts up dead trees to create imitations of life, whereas the women nurture actually living things.

After a few episodes, we leap 14 years into the present, and Alice, now played by Alycia Debnam-Carey, is escaping what one had assumed to be paradise — but maybe not — and lighting out for the territories. She’ll find an occupation — as a park ranger — a gaggle of friends, who like to dance and party, and a whole new set of scenic views. She also finds Dylan (Sebastián Zurita), a fellow ranger who anyone can see almost from the moment he appears is trouble. (Unlike the female characters, most of whom have been shaped by one sort of trauma or another, these men are presented without context, and I suppose you could say they don’t deserve one — not quite one-note characters, the better to put us off-guard, but basically engines of violence, not humans with a chance of recovery.) Twig sets out from Thornfield to find Alice, while things progress in the lives of Sally and John and June.

The cast is uniformly excellent, with Browne and Debnam-Carey, as young and young-adult Alice, carrying a lot of weight. But it’s a special treat to see Weaver, who does not overplay her assumed Australian accent, in such a substantial part; if the series seems a little long, one may at least appreciate the greater time it affords us to spend in her company. Her June, who seems stubbornly fixed at first, proves more mercurial, her taciturn toughness and controlling nature products of a finally revealed backstory that will lead to a much-belated reckoning with herself. Eventually, as in any satisfying story, the truth will out.

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Book review: The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart by Holly Ringland

I put a call out a week or so ago on my Facebook page, asking people about books they’ve loved this year . I explained I was starting to plan my ‘favourite novels of 2018’ post and wanted to check if I’d missed out on something I REALLY should have read. I used The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart as an example. It wasn’t a book I requested for review but I’d read nothing but AMAZING things about it.

Of course, people said the same about Gone Girl and Big Little Lies and (for me) both of those turned out to be somewhat anti-climactic so it was with some trepidation I borrowed Lost Flowers from a friend.

But… Oh. My. God. For the most part this book was amazing and I was hooked from the beginning.

After her family suffers a tragedy when she is nine years old, Alice Hart is forced to leave her idyllic seaside home. She is taken in by her estranged grandmother, June, a flower farmer who raises Alice on the language of Australian native flowers, a way to say the things that are too hard to speak. But Alice also learns that there are secrets within secrets about her past. Under the watchful eye of June and The Flowers, women who run the farm, Alice grows up. But an unexpected betrayal sends her reeling, and she flees to the dramatically beautiful central Australian desert. Alice thinks she has found solace, until she falls in love with Dylan, a charismatic and ultimately dangerous man.

Ringland’s writing is superb. The way we readers are given insight into Alice’s home life through those opening pages: her nine-year old perception of the very small world to which she’s exposed; the way she talks about her mother’s passion for flowers; and her innocent yet very-real understanding of her father and her parents’ relationship.

What might it be like, if her father was consumed by fire? All his monsters burned to ash, leaving the best of him to rise, renewed by flames, remade into the man he sometimes was: the man who made her a desk so she could write stories. p 4

The imagery Ringland’s writing elicits during the early chapters is stunning. Vivid and confronting. Very visceral.

The events that take place just after we meet Alice, both make and break her. And that part of the book – the first half or so – I found to be just beautiful. Stunningly written, poignant and very raw.

…life is lived forward but you only understood backward. You can’t see the landscape you’re in while you’re in it. p 11

We stay with Alice for a while in her new life before skipping forward a little. Twice. And I felt something was slightly lost both of times as I felt less engaged when we reconnected with Alice and those around her. The later transition (almost the last); Alice’s travel to the Northern Territory, felt more grounded as we were with her every step of the way and the pacing was more consistent.

Ringland’s obviously done her research and there’s a very strong sense of traditions and history throughout this book. First through Thornfield – ‘a place where flowers and women could bloom’ (p 71) and Alice’s own legacy; and then we delve deep into Indigenous culture. And we’re offered a very strong sense of place via Ringland’s descriptive prose.

In her author’s note Ringland tells us the location of Kililpitjara and the Earnshaw Crater are fictional but inspired by real places and stories and grounded in Aboriginal culture.  And of course Alice, given her own strong ties to nature and its offerings appreciates this.

There was – as a result – a sense of fate or destiny that we ultimately find our ‘home’. However, Ringland turns that on its head a little at the end and I liked the way she finished the book and the story of some of those we’d met.

The early part of this book reminded me of one of my favourite books of this year (as this might well be), The Yellow House by Emily O’Grady, also told through the eyes of a child proffering a mix of desperation and despondency as well as hope.

There’s the sad reference to domestic and family violence throughout this book and the impact it has, not just on the victims and perpetrators, but those around them (and yet another legacy…).

This book is also about secrets. I was agog people are so good at keeping them and so resolute about doing so. I couldn’t understand why Alice didn’t demand answers but then pondered on her early life, when she learned not to ask questions. I can’t imagine others here (though) not being tempted or inclined to tell Alice more about her history or that of her family, given it was partially their story as well. And of course there’s a sad lesson in that, the more we try to control (the truth and) those around us, the more we push them away.

This is a lovely book. Ringland’s cleverly woven native plants and flowers through the chapters and the prose as well as history and mythology – from a range of cultures – through the book’s theme.  And although Ringland offers us many (many) strong female characters, there’s a pervading sense of their need to pitch the preservation of their legacies (and themselves) against the inevitability of change.

Finally I think this book is about people coming into our lives when we most need them and a belief that THAT can happen. (In Alice’s case Sally, June, Twig, Candy and the Flowers, Oggi, Moss, Lulu and Ruby.)

The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart by Holly Ringland was published by Harper Collins Australia and is now available.

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Hi, I’m Deborah… a seachanger living on Australia’s Fraser Coast, in Queensland. I write about books and life in general.

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The Lost Flowers Of Alice Hart explained: a full plot recap

The Lost Flowers Of Alice Hart is one of the most exciting TV series released by Amazon Prime in 2023. Based on the bestseller book by Holly Ringland, the series follows the story of Alice Hart from childhood to maturity, while she discovers the secrets around her life and all lessons that need to be learned. The plot surely needs to be explained, and a full recap is necessary: what happened in the fire that killed her parents, Clem and Agnes? Why did June keep all those secrets? And what’s the meaning of the story? Let’s explore everything together.

You can watch the official trailer for The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart here on Youtube .

When Alice Hart was a child, her life was pretty challenging. Her father, Clem, is a violent man who often beats her. Alice is a sensitive girl who loves reading and often visits the library with her mother, Agnes. The librarian, Sally, shows special care for Alice: the little girl reminds her of Gemma, Sally’s daughter, who died some years before.

The plot of The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart is triggered by a decisive event that will need to be explained in a full recap. When Alice was 9, a fire burned down her home, and her parents, Clem and Agnes, died. Agnes was pregnant: we will discover later in the series that the baby will survive.

Alice survives, too. While she’s in the hospital, her grandmother shows up: June is Clem’s mother, who never met Alice and didn’t speak to anyone in her family for years. We discover that Agnes has decided in her will that June will have custody of Alice, but if there are doubts about her capacity to care for her, the custody will go to Sally, the librarian. This surprises everybody: Agnes wasn’t so close to Sally to justify this decision.

While the plot of The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart continues, we discover more connections between Sally and Alice’s family. Gemma, Sally’s dead daughter, was actually Clem’s daughter. So Sally develops a special relationship with Alice, driven by the physical resemblance with her own daughter (Alice and Gemma have the same biological father). We also discover that Agnes saw a friend in Sally, and she was sharing with her a plan to leave Clem with Alice and find refuge at June’s farm, through the books they kept borrowing. After Alice’s parents die, Sally does her best to obtain custody, but she ultimately accepts that June will take care of her. One crucial element is later explained by the plot of The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart and needs to be highlighted in this recap: the baby who survived the fire will be adopted by Sally and John. So Charlie, the boy we see in the second half of the series, is Alice’s brother, who miraculously survived the fire.

All this happens while Alice grows up in June’s flower farm. We discover episode after episode that June developed a web of secrets around Alice. While growing up, Alice falls in love with Oggi, her schoolmate. Still, June sees that relationship as a threat to her safety. June will report Oggi to the Immigration office, causing his deportation. After that, June sends a fake email to Oggi, pretending to be Alice breaking up with him. Oggi will write letters to Alice for years, but June will hide them all. The trigger that makes Alice run away is the discovery of Oggi’s last letter: when Oggi tells her that she kept writing to her for years despite her breakup email, Alice understands that June is responsible for everything that happened. We also discover that June did the same with Charlie: she kept Alice unaware of her brother’s existence so she wouldn’t be tempted to leave the farm. When the other women in the farm discover June’s secrets, they are shocked.

This kicks off the second part of the plot of The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart , where many more elements will be explained (as you find them in this recap). Now 23, Alice escapes the farm and reaches a small town named like her mother. She meets Moss, a good man who works there as a vet, but she’s fascinated by Dylan. After a first phase, where Dylan seems to love Alice authentically, he progressively shows his real face: he is a violent man, abusing and attacking Alice, making her feel always guilty, although she does nothing wrong. From this, we understand the meaning of the second part of The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart : history repeats itself for Alice, a new violent man is now in her life, and her mother’s words push her to let that happen without reaction.

Alice will be a victim of an episode of violence by Dylan’s hand. She will discover the violent side of men and will ask for help from June and Twig. After returning to the farm, June intends to fix the mistake she made in life: she reveals the truth about Charlie to Alice, and Alice will leave to meet her brother. After meeting Sally again, she will also learn the truth about the fire: it wasn’t her who killed her parents; it was Agnes, her mother, to kill her father Clem while he was choking her. Agnes tried to save Alice and escape with her to June’s farm, but she dies intoxicated by the smoke.

When June dies, she will leave a letter to every important woman in her life. June’s letter to Alice is her last life lesson: Alice will learn to speak against violence and prevent men from silencing their voices. The ultimate meaning of The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart is explained in the plot ending: through all the experiences and the stories shared by the women at the farm, Alice will grow and learn how to face this cruel world.

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The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart

• Sigourney Weaver as June Hart; Asher Keddie as Sally Morgan; Leah Purcell as Twig; Frankie Adams as Candy; Alexander England as John Morgan; Charlie Vickers as Clem Hart; Alyla Browne as Young Alice Hart; Tilda Cobham-Hervey as Agnes Hart; Alycia Debnam-Carey as Alice Hart; Maggie Dence as Boo; Dalara Williams as Myf; Amy Kersey as Rosie; Sebastián Zurita as Dylan
• Prime Video

TV Series Review

Alice Hart was born on an Australian road. So her mother told her, anyway. Perhaps it’s only fitting that her life would be so rocky.

She grew up with bruises on her arms and fear in her soul. Her mother would sink into deep depression. Her father would carve wonders for 9-year-old Alice—then beat her if she displeased him.

And then one day it was all gone—burned to ash.

Petal Power

After the fire, Alice was whisked away to the home of her grandmother, June. And what a curious home it was to be. Thornfield wasn’t just a house; it was a plantation, a flower farm worked by the women who found themselves there. Those women—called “the flowers” themselves—didn’t just care for plants. They used them to communicate. Through flowers, they spoke about truths and problems that words struggled to encompass.

But even flowers can’t communicate all the home’s secrets.

Before the fire, Alice never even knew that June existed. She never heard about the farm or its bevy of inhabitants. If Alice’s mom and dad kept a whole family secret, what secrets might June be holding? What skeletons lurk in Thornfield’s many closets?

As Alice grows up, the secrets seem to grow in importance. She wants to know what’s been kept so hidden. She wants to understand her strange upbringing—both before the age of 9 and after.

But those secrets may be too hard to stomach, the betrayals to bitter to bear. And if she leaves this home, where will home be?

The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart , a seven-part miniseries on Amazon’s Prime Video, is based on the debut novel of Holly Ringland—a poetic rumination on story, family and creating your own destiny. The television series mirrors some of the book’s almost fairy-tale quality, with dream-like scenes intertwined with Alice’s love of old folklore and the mystical language of flowers.

It doesn’t appear that there’s any actual magic in play, but we see near occultic echoes throughout, even at this early juncture. Locks of hair are tied into doll-like figures and hung, like charms, on bedframes and barns. The folklore we hear comes with its own mythological or pagan undertones. And Thornfield is an object of suspicion amongst the surrounding locals, who suspect it’s populated by “witches, drug addicts or lesbians.”

The locals may be onto something. June and Twig (the latter seemingly Thornfield’s second in command) appear to be in a committed relationship. The two women share a tender kiss in the opening episode, and Trig tells June that Alice is “ our granddaughter.”

We also hear a bit of strong language, including a rare f-word. Some other profanity occasionally drops into the dialogue, too. Still, the showrunners seem to understand that a lot of swear words would run counter to the grim fairytale vibe the show’s gunning for.

In other words, The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart is a difficult, problematic show, but it’s not a gratuitous one. It focuses on the story and its complex characters. But just as Alice’s world is one of pain and secrets, so this show is filled with its own hidden dangers.

Episode Reviews

Aug. 4, 2023—s1, ep1: “episode one”.

The premiere episode introduces us to 9-year-old Alice and her parents, Agnes and Clem. And while at first it would seem that the family lives an idyllic life by the sea, it soon becomes obvious that Clem keeps Agnes and Alice practically imprisoned in their faraway home. When Clem’s gone and Agnes sinks into a deep depression, Alice decides to walk into town and meets a kindly librarian named Sally, who notices the bruises on her arms.

Alice’s trip to town triggers a welfare visit by police—a visit that subsequently triggers a vicious beating. But the officer also brings a handful of books that Alice “forgot” at the library. One of those books, Fire Gods: Myths and Legends , becomes particularly interesting to Alice. She’s especially attracted to the myth of the phoenix, a creature that sets itself on fire at the end of its life, and then is reborn as a result of the immolation. Shortly thereafter, Alice’s own family homestead is destroyed by fire—and Alice’s parents and unborn baby brother are apparently killed.

Alice is also seriously hurt—though it appears her injuries are from Clem, not the fire. One of her eyes is swollen shut, and her face is covered with bruises and her arms heavily bandaged. We hear that one of Alice’s lungs has collapsed and that her trachea suffered trauma, likely from being choked. Her mother, Anges, was alive when she arrived at the hospital, but a death certificate confirms the woman’s demise. (The baby was delivered, but being only 25 weeks old, doctors expect the premature boy to die.) The last we see of Clem is in a body bag.

Earlier, Alice imagines pouring gasoline on her father and setting him on fire. We see him wake up, engulfed in flames, and lurch toward Alice.

Both Alice and her mother have bruises on their arms. Clem yanks Alice into a room; off-camera, we hear her scream amid the sounds of his implied physical abuse. In flashback, a woman walks into an ocean, apparently with the desire to kill herself. We’re told that Agnes gave birth to Alice in the middle of a road. After the birth, Agnes apparently stopped breathing. Alice’s squalls revived her, and Agnes tells Alice, “You brought me back to life.”

A hand bears a horrific scar. June walks around the flower farm with a gun, as if expecting to be attacked.

We hear various legends, including a critical one about the selkie . It’s an Irish myth about a group of half-seal, half-woman creatures who would strip off their sealskin coats and dance naked on the beach once a year. We’re told that a man stole one of the selkie’s sealskins and thus condemned the selkie to be with him, until she found the coat and returned to her sisters. (The show intends for us to ponder the parallels between the selkie’s story and what little we know of Agnes.)

Sally gives Alice a Harry Potter book, telling her that it’s only the most famous children’s series of all time. We see hair twisted into doll-like creations. Women design bouquets of flowers that double as messages for those who can understand them. (When one woman makes such a bouquet, another woman sees the flowers being used and asks, “Who died?”)

Two women share a kiss and refer to Alice as “our granddaughter.” Someone drinks a beer, and another character also seems to consume an alcoholic beverage. We hear the f-word twice—but once in the background so it’s barely audible. We also hear “a–.”

Paul Asay has been part of the Plugged In staff since 2007, watching and reviewing roughly 15 quintillion movies and television shows. He’s written for a number of other publications, too, including Time, The Washington Post and Christianity Today. The author of several books, Paul loves to find spirituality in unexpected places, including popular entertainment, and he loves all things superhero. His vices include James Bond films, Mountain Dew and terrible B-grade movies. He’s married, has two children and a neurotic dog, runs marathons on occasion and hopes to someday own his own tuxedo. Feel free to follow him on Twitter @AsayPaul.

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The Lost Flowers Of Alice Hart Review: Lies, Abuse, And Bad Storytelling Abound In This Story Of Woe

• The show sure is pretty to look at
• The characters don't make a lot of sense
• There are problems with the structure
• The series treats dogs like accessories

There are some shows that seem intriguing based purely on the premise. Take this show, based on Holly Ringland's book. The trailers make it look like an action-packed mystery of secrets and lies. The reality, unfortunately, is very different. Plodding, muddled, and featuring a major character who refuses to tell the truth for inexplicable reasons, "The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart" is tedious to watch.

The story starts in a small town in Australia, where 9-year-old Alice Hart (Alyla Browne) lives with her parents. While initially, things seem fine, the show soon reveals that Alice's father, Clem (Charlie Vickers), has been beating her and her mother, Agnes (Tilda Cobham-Hervey). Things escalate and Alice's parents die in a fire that leaves Alice badly hurt and in a coma. When she finally wakes up, she goes to stay with her estranged grandmother, June ( Sigourney Weaver ).

June runs a flower farm called Thornfield that takes in women who are trying to escape the violent men in their lives. Alice has an idyllic childhood growing up amongst them, but she can't stop her grandmother from lying to her. When she's 24, Alice ( Alycia Debnam-Carey ) discovers a truth so upsetting she takes off.

She lands in a place called Agnes Bluff, where she finds her place among a group of park rangers and meets Dylan (Sebastian Zurita), a good-looking guy who loves her. But their relationship deteriorates and he eventually beats her just for hugging another man. Alice calls home to get away, but June takes her to the home of Sally Morgan (Asher Keddie), where she meets her 14-year-old brother, Charlie (Jeremy Blewitt), whose existence Alice knew nothing about. Alice bonds with Charlie and eventually, after her grandmother dies, goes back to Thornfield and mourns her death.

While the story is peppered with metaphors regarding the meaning of various flowers, it doesn't amount to much. Instead, the series focuses on Alice's suffering, particularly her grandmother's lies and the beatings she receives at multiple stages of her life, making this a difficult story to sit through. But it's not just because the lead character is repeatedly victimized — it's also hard to sit through because of the way the story is told for TV.

The characters have poorly drawn inner lives

"The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart" may have been able to shed light on the interior lives of these characters as a novel, but as a TV show, the thoughts of the characters are sadly obscured from us. We're left with characters whose actions don't make much sense, particularly Weaver's June.

From the moment we meet her, we know something's off about June. She's determined not to bring Alice home, allowing Sally to adopt her, but after one positive interaction she changes her mind. Then, from the moment she brings Alice home she lies to her. She tells Alice that her mother never lived there, when there's evidence everywhere that she did. She lies to her about her brother dying shortly after birth. She gets Alice's boyfriend deported in order to keep them from marrying. And she doesn't tell Alice about the fact that she's dying. Plus, she hides her lies by intercepting letters and replying to them as Alice, asking her brother and boyfriend not to contact her. If we could understand June's motives better maybe this all could have been dramatic, but as it stands, June mostly just comes across as a controlling shrew. While you get to understand some of what June has suffered through as the show goes on, it doesn't make up for her numerous lies.

Then there's Alice herself, who seems to mostly go from sad situation to sad situation. While she has happy moments, these are fleeting. She spends most of her time either crying, fainting, or cowering in fear as both a child and an adult. The only other characters who are given even this level of depth are Sally (who has some secrets of her own, although these are more understandable) and Twig (Leah Purcell), who's mostly defined by the two children who were taken from her and by her relationship with June. Most everyone else is just a cipher.

Problems with the filmmaking

These story issues aren't helped by problems with the filmmaking. The series is told in a linear fashion, but this leaves the narrative struggling to highlight the echoes between Alice's childhood and adult life. Though there's some attempt to do so, the flashbacks are fleeting and don't have much heft. Even the events that are told mostly through flashbacks are shown in such brief scenes that the viewer wonders if there was more to the story.

Meanwhile, other things are hidden and told to us later, as if the subterfuge of June is backed up by the subterfuge of the filmmaking. All seven episodes of the show were directed by Glendyn Ivin, who revisits particular images over and over, but without more context, they don't have nearly the weight he seems to think they do.

Also, this may be a particular issue for me, but I feel it's worth mentioning: The series has a strange relationship with dogs. Though Alice and June both have dogs, they're more an accessory than a member of the family. Young Alice's dog is forgotten as soon as the fire takes out Alice's parents, and 24-year-old Alice's dog is shown at various points, but is forgotten at key moments. It seems the people who made the show want dogs around when it's convenient but not enough to pay them any mind when it's not. It's sloppy filmmaking and alienated me further from the characters.

"The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart" has good intentions but can't follow through on them. Even the time period is confusing, relying as it does on a transition from paper letters to emails and smartphones. In the end, it's a pretty but shallow attempt at a story that may have meant more on the page.

The first three episodes of "The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart" premiere on August 4 on Prime Video, with new episodes premiering weekly until September 1.

This piece was written during the 2023 WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes. Without the labor of the writers and actors currently on strike, the series being reviewed here wouldn't exist.

The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart (TV) Cast

Alyla Browne

as Young Alice Hart (7 episodes)

Alyla Browne portrays the young Alice Hart in flashbacks and childhood scenes. Through her performance, the character of young Alice offers insights into the formative experiences that shape the adult Alice's journey.

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