Screen legend Sigourney Weaver leads a stellar cast in a new Australian miniseries that’s sure to leap instantly to the top of your “mist see” list. The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart debuts exclusively on Amazon Prime Video on August 4.
Based on the acclaimed debut novel of the same name by Holly Ringland, The Lost Hours of Alice Hart focuses, naturally enough, on the titular character, played as a child by Alyla Browne and as an adult by Alycia Debnam-Carey.
After she loses both parents in a tragic and mysterious house fire, young Alice is packed off to Thornfield flower farm to live with her grandmother, June (Sigourney Weaver, last seen as an alien teenager in Avatar: The Way of Water). There, she will discover secrets within secrets involving her and her family’s past, but unravelling the real truth is a decades-long journey (hence the dual casting).
Asher Keddie, Leah Purcell, Frankie Adams, Alexander England, Charlie Vickers, Tilda Cobham-Hervey, Xavier Samuel, and Sebastian Zurita co-star in the seven-part series, with the first three eps dropping on August 4. Subsequent episodes will be released weekly. This one comes to us courtesy of showrunner and producer Sarah Lambert, whose credits include the prestige series Lamb of God, here sharing writing duties with Kirsty Fisher and Kim Wilson.
Ringland’s 2018 novel was a runaway bestseller on publication, the kind of intricate, generation-spanning, Australian Gothic domestic epic that’s easy to disappear into. Key to the book is the way it uses flowers as a symbolic language, each species of blossom tied to the various emotional and thematic threads running through the narrative.
Whether series director Glendyn Ivin manages to translate that to the screen remains to be seen, but based on the source material and cast along, this looks like top-tier television that should be a cut above the usual “remote community with a dark past” fare.
