Midway through the second episode of The Lost Flowers Of Alice Hart, Prime Video’s adaptation of Holly Ringland’s bestselling debut novel, June Hart (Sigourney Weaver), the steely matriarch of a private refuge created exclusively for orphaned and/or abused women, tells her nine-year-old granddaughter, Alice (Alyla Browne), about a family heirloom that has been passed down for generations. It’s a handmade book called the Thornfield Language Of Flowers, named after June’s flower farm where women of all ages and backgrounds live and work in pursuit of a fresh start and in exchange for protection from the men who once hurt them. “It’s our very own secret language,” June coos at Alice while flipping through the crisp pages late one evening. Each flower, or combination of flowers, represents a different phrase, sometimes conveying a message that is too difficult to articulate out loud, like wattle (which means “always with you”), river lily (“love concealed”), desert oak (“resurrection”), and wheel of fire (“the color of my fate”).
That visual language serves as the foundation of a sweeping seven-part miniseries that starts as a matriarchal family drama but gradually blooms into a harrowing—and at times overwrought—exploration of generational trauma and abuse and the lies we tell in the name of protecting ourselves and our loved ones. Adapted by Sarah Lambert and directed by Glendyn Ivin, The Lost Flowers Of Alice Hart (out August 4) tells the coming-of-age story of the titular protagonist (played by Browne as a child and Alycia Debnam-Carey as a young adult), who is taken to live with her paternal grandmother after her violent father, Clem (Charlie Vickers), and vulnerable mother, Agnes (Tilda Cobham-Hervey), die in a house fire.
Alice encounters a number of women (called Flowers) who have taken up residence at Thornfield, including Twig (Leah Purcell), an Indigenous person whose children were taken by child protective services, and Candy Blue (Frankie Adams), who grew up on the property after being abandoned as an infant. While the Flowers attempt to help Alice settle into her new normal, a local librarian (Asher Keddie) and her police-officer husband (Alexander England), who recently lost their young daughter, take a vested interest in Alice, whom they both encountered shortly before her parents were killed.
Set against some of Australia’s most breathtaking natural landscapes, which are beautifully and hauntingly captured by cinematographer Sam Chiplin, the series unfolds a lot like a mystery novel, with flashbacks woven throughout to contextualize the women’s actions and conflicting motivations. For a story that spans nearly two decades, one may have expected Lambert to use a more complex narrative structure for the screen adaptation, in which an adult Alice reflects on her childhood starting in the pilot. But the writer-showrunner has chosen to adhere to the general arc of the novel, dedicating the first three episodes to Alice’s upbringing (including the vision she has of setting her own abusive father on fire) and the final four to what happens when a now-24-year-old Alice flees Thornfield after discovering the extent of her grandmother’s lies and personal betrayal. And it turns out that dividing the show’s main timelines and having two actors play the young woman, the audience’s entry point into Thornfield, works better for this story.
Despite being the youngest member of the cast, Browne, who portrayed the daughter of Nicole Kidman’s Masha in Hulu’s Nine Perfect Strangers, delivers one of the most remarkable and heart-wrenching performances of the entire ensemble. Given that Alice temporarily loses her voice—both literally and figuratively—in the fire that killed her parents, Browne is given the tall order of conveying the earliest stages of her character’s grief and guilt without saying a word for most of the first three episodes. Emoting merely with facial expressions and body language, the young actor’s magnetic screen presence only intensifies when Alice begins to feel her mother’s presence around Thornfield, despite June’s insistence that she never visited the estate.
The back half of the limited series provides a long-awaited showcase for Debnam-Carey, who was let down by poor writing in a tedious book-to-screen adaptation that debuted earlier this year. Having risen to fame for her work in the sci-fi (The 100) and horror (Fear The Walking Dead) genres, Debnam-Carey is able to more easily tap into those difficult emotions associated with life-or-death situations, albeit in a more grounded story here. (There aren’t any zombies for her to fight off this time around, in case you’re wondering.) It’s easy to empathize with Debnam-Carey’s sensitive portrayal of Alice, whose sheltered upbringing with the Flowers has caused her to develop a blind spot to many of the same patterns of toxic behavior that her father once exhibited in her own romantic relationships as an adult.
With much of the same strength and gravitas that has defined the characters she has played on the silver screen, Weaver carries the weight of a thorny woman who has dedicated her life to protecting young women who have been preyed upon, imbuing the character with a complexity and duality that remains rare for women of a certain age on-screen. Although viewers are not given much backstory about June apart from an event in her teens that became the catalyst for her life’s work at Thornfield, Weaver’s subtlety of emotion, particularly in the moments between the lines when one cannot distinguish between June’s moments of quiet strength and vulnerability, makes her impossible to ignore when she appears onscreen.
The flowers are a way for June to express her feelings without dealing with them, but their symbolism eventually becomes muddied and convoluted—either by design or not—because there comes a point where the flowers can’t express what needs to be communicated. Across seven episodes, June’s intricate web of deceit begins to unravel, but even for those who have not read the source material, the seeds are all planted early enough that the occasionally soapy plot twists, which are part of the novel’s appeal, still feel earned and thoughtfully constructed.
Although The Lost Flowers effectively fleshes out the lives of the Harts, the same can’t be said of the women who make up June and Alice’s chosen family. We hear bits and pieces of exposition about how the Flowers came to live at Thornfield, but apart from Twig and Candy, they are seen but rarely heard. Domestic and gender-based violence affects women of all backgrounds, but aside from a brief exploration of Twig’s Indigenous roots, the series doesn’t seem as interested in delving into the stories of women of color, choosing to leave those perspectives on the periphery. A TV show or movie cannot and should not bear the responsibility of representing all women, but it’s worth noting that violence against women isn’t simply a gendered issue—it’s a racial one as well. As such, The Lost Flowers could have benefited from taking a wider approach that does not treat its characters of color like window dressing, and it’s possible that this is simply a reflection of the current state of Australia’s film industry.
June argues that the “lost Flowers” of Thornfield represent the stories of women whose lives and histories have been erased and rewritten, often at the hands of men who are supposed to protect them. Through listening to the tales of survivors, June reiterates that she found her voice again and encourages Alice to do the same—something that sounds good in principle but that we rarely see the adult Alice do for ourselves until the final minutes of the finale, when we’re meant to believe that she will not fall back into the same patterns of behavior despite evidence of the contrary earlier in the episode. While this dissonance slightly undermines its emotional climax, the show still largely succeeds as a powerful depiction of solidarity and sisterhood, showing what can happen when women are given the freedom to blossom together.
The Lost Flowers Of Alice Hart premieres August 4 on Prime Video