2 out of 5

Created by: Sarah Lambert

A slow, ponderously told tale of lingering traumas which doesn’t take advantage of its many skilled actresses, or the potential of its themes and narrative devices.

The image of a seemingly idyllic family of young Alice (Alyla Browne) and her mother, Agnes (Tilda Cobham-Hervey), and father, Clem (Charlie Vickers) is frayed by some odd signs: maybe they’re rather isolated, with promises of taking Alice off the homestead reverted, and there are indications that she’s not seen much of the world beyond that home. Conversations trail off with either mystery or menace between mom and dad; she sleeps in sometimes and cries. When Alice sneaks off to the local library, the librarian notices bruises on her arms, and is quite aware of who Alice’s mother and – more specifically – father are.

The police visit the home and Alice’s bruises are covered; the police have nothing actionable to pursue. But when they depart, the beast we know is hiding here rears its head.

Adapting some fairy tale stories of justice and revenge she’s heard from her mother, or read in her books, Alice kicks off a series of events that leaves her an orphan, moving in with her estranged grandmother, June (Sigourney Weaver), on a flower farm.

The farm is staffed only by women; their specialty is arranging flowers into symbolic messages – a language passed down via June’s teachings. Such messages precede each entry of the series, with artful shots interspersed throughout when someone needs to leave an important, episode-thematically-relevant message for someone on the farm. This is a rather sillily overwrought, but nonetheless interesting plot device, and because the show’s writers and director Glendyn Ivin only employ it at select moments, it works as a good emotional beat in an emotionally heightened tale.

We spend a few episodes with Alice coming out of her shell under June’s strict but mostly sagacious tutelage. There are some interesting parallels in this world and her previous one: a choice exposure to knowledge; wielding of power to sway behaviors. But, as one of the things the series attempts to study and question, the intentions of our actions are important – and what of the legacies of both the intention, and the action?

Jump ahead to Alice as a young adult (Alycia Debnam-Carey) and June’s legacy now has a directly deleterious effect: Alice leaves the farm to go on her own journey, severing ties with her farm family to both reconnect with her past, and also forge her own future.

My explaining the basic beats of the story is akin to explaining the majority of what The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart offers in terms of narrative. There are some very, very heavy story elements included – mental, physical, sexual abuse; mental health; disease – and some excellent actresses across the board giving characters light behind their eyes, and further weight to when they experience or talk about these elements, but the writing to give these expressions a voice just isn’t there. The visual style is somber and poetic; of the glossy, wandering-camera school of recent dramas like Little Fires Everywhere, but that visual style requires equally strong narration to balance out its artistry, and Flowers wants to use silence and floral arrangements to substitute for that.

There’s a lingering vibe of mystery with the treatment of Alice’s upbringing that is misleading; characters who are similarly left enigmatic are simply undeveloped on screen, somewhat wasting the skills of Frankie Adams, or even Weaver. Much of this is done so we can backfill our understanding of characters through little reveals of self in dialogue, but it’s pushed too far to the fringes (or to too late in the show) such that actions seem unmotivated. To me, this suggests an imbalanced adaptation of the source book: longer character arcs that could’ve been more internal on page haven’t translated well to the screen, and the shorter runtime of prestige TV shows (even a semi-regular 10- or 13-episodes now down to 7) causes Flowers creators to start running after a more intriguingly slower, contemplative opening, while also trying to maintain that slow and contemplative tone… Big reveals and some very sobering moments in the last couple episodes have cinematic weight of being well-shot and acted, so you can get residual emotions from just that, but they do not track effectively in the way the story is told. It seems like a disservice to the seriousness of the material, and the admittedly unique storytelling devices / plot elements (even if I’ve criticized some of them as being a bit too elaborate).

The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart is, ultimately, one of those shows where you can walk away with a plot description, but not a clear take on the point, or even the main character. Alice’s name is in the title, and we certainly spend much of the runtime with her, but the show is also clearly a vehicle for Sigourney Weaver, to say nothing of its tip-toed forays into Australian / Aboriginal politics, mostly via the excellent Leah Purcell (with hellos to some Wentworth cameos…!). I’d fully believe the book is excellent; the adaptation likely could’ve used more room to tell its story, or a more sagacious edit that stripped away some of its excess in favor of a stronger central narrative.