That lugubrious pacing can be frustrating,and is rather typical of a certain brand of prestige drama in the streaming age. But stick with it because when it finally does get there,The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart pays off in spades.
Alycia Debnam-Carey,the Australian actor whose biggest successes to date have been in post-apocalyptic US sci-fi (The 100) and horror (Fear The Walking Dead),is the titular Alice,and is billed as a star of all seven episodes,though she doesn’t appear until the fourth. But when she does,it is with a burst of sudden anger that propels the plot into life.
As a child (played by Alyla Browne),Alice dreams of setting her abusive father,Clem (Charlie Vickers),alight. But the blaze that consumes him on the family sugarcane farm also takes her beloved and heavily pregnant mother,Agnes (Tilda Cobham-Hervey).
In the aftermath of this domestic apocalypse,Alice is raised by her grandmother June (Sigourney Weaver) on a remote property called Thornfield,where abused women come to seek refuge and to tend the native plants June grows and sells. This ageing matriarch tends the women,too,calling them her flowers.