Tara Ward checks out the moody new Australian drama starring Sigourney Weaver and Frankie Adams. 

What’s all this then?

The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart is a new Australian drama hitting Prime Video today. It’s based on the bestselling novel by Holly Ringland, and features an impressive cast that includes Sigourney Weaver (Avatar), Asher Keddie (Offspring), Alycia Debnam-Carey (The 100) and New Zealand actor Frankie Adams (Shortland Street). It’s made by the producers of Big Little Lies and Nine Perfect Strangers, but instead of Nicole Kidman doing a Russian accent, Lost Flowers has an American actor (Weaver) putting on her best Australian twang. 

What’s good? 

If you love an emotional slow burn that’s heavy on melancholy and atmosphere, Lost Flowers is the show for you. It’s beautifully shot, with lush green landscapes and dark brooding skies, and it’s rich in colour and light. The international cast is solid, particularly Keddie as small-town librarian Sally, and Weaver as Alice’s gruff grandmother June. Together, these two very different women anchor the show as they fight to care for Alice, a young girl who wakes up after a house fire to discover all her family is dead. 

That’s right, everyone in Alice’s family dies in the first episode – it’s not exactly the cheeriest of starts. Alice comes from a violent home, where she has a close and loving relationship with her pregnant mother Agnes. Agnes tells her daughter the Scottish folk stories of the silkies who escape their skin to find happiness, which is an escape Agnes knows she’ll never make – she can’t even disobey her husband to take Alice into town for a chocolate lamington. Alice wonders why she has no other family, but her father seems determined to keep them isolated. 

One afternoon Alice is left home alone, and after wandering into her father’s barn – which is filled with sculptures of flowers and a mysterious wooden woman who could definitely be Sigourney Weaver in her Galaxy Quest era – accidentally starts a fire. Her parents arrive home, but a scared Alice hides as the house begins to burn. Then, a plot twist: after dropping the bombshell that Alice has lost her parents and baby brother in the fire, doctors reveal that Alice’s injuries aren’t fire related. Something unexplained has happened to Alice, but when she wakes up, she’s too traumatised to speak. 

Everyone in this series is hiding a secret, and sometimes those secrets are hiding yet more secrets. Librarian Sally is grieving her own personal tragedy and swoops in to rescue Alice, bringing her chocolate lamingtons and Harry Potter novels. But why does Sally have one of Alice’s father’s wooden sculptures stashed in her attic? A stoic, prickly June arrives to claim the granddaughter she never knew she had, but why were June and her son estranged for so long? And why are June’s partner Twig (Wentworth’s Leah Purcell) and daughter Candy (Adams) so nervous about June and Alice’s return to Thornfield flower farm?

June’s farm is a place where flowers say things that words can’t express, but it also feels like a place filled with even more secrets. How many secrets can one show have, and which ones will Alice find out about first? 

What’s bad?

By modern TV standards Lost Flowers moves at a glacial speed, so expect to slowly sink into this and be patient as the story unfolds. This is a show that wants to take its time, but there’s the risk that some viewers won’t want to wait. Also, episode one is a heavy start to the series. Let’s hope Alice finds more moments of light among the darkness, including eating as many chocolate lamingtons as she wants. 

Verdict: Watch it

The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart is a quiet, emotional story about grief and secrets. It’s about how we build our lives on the stories we’ve been told, and how these stories bend and shift depending on who’s telling them. The cast is strong, there are plenty of complex female characters and the show celebrates Australia’s natural beauty – fingers crossed the tone will become more uplifting as adult Alice makes sense of her past. Just as June’s flowers will grow and bloom again, so should Alice. 

The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart screens on Prime Video from Friday 4 August.