There’s a prominent nod in the title of The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart (Prime Video from Friday) to Virginia Andrews’ cult 70s shocker, Flowers In the Attic. The similarities run deeper than their names. As with Andrews’s pungent tale of kids locked in an evil grandmother’s little loft of horrors, The Lost Flowers uses gothic melodrama to explore domestic violence and childhood drama.
It’s Ken Loach remade by Dario Argento – grim as anything but over the top and beautifully absurd. The Lost Flowers also features perfect big-name casting in Sigourney Weaver. She is magnificently aloof as an icy matriarch who volunteers to care for her newly-orphaned granddaughter, Alice (Alyla Browne, later played as an adult by Alycia Debnam-Carey) in New South Wales.
Yet, if Weaver receives prime billing, the true star in Sarah Lambert’s adaptation of Holly Ringland’s best-seller is the breathtaking cinematography. Director Glendyn Ivin turns coastal Australia into a stark wonderland of desert landscapes and burnished sunsets.
Flowers are a recurring metaphor. They are tokens of love given to Alice by her parents, even when their actions suggest that love is conditional at best. They also represent buried secrets, the wilting of the human spirit and the capacity for renewal (Weaver’s character runs a flower farm that doubles as a shelter for abused women).
Lost Flowers is more about mood than plot in its early episodes. Tragedy befalls Alice when a blaze consumes the family home, killing her parents. But she isn’t too upset, and neither are we. We’ve already seen how tragic her life was before the fire took the father she hated and the mother she loved.
There are moments when the pace verges on glacial. Entire scenes consist of characters gazing at the sky or into a flower thicket. Weaver, in particular, has lots of screen time but little dialogue. She is generally asked to simply purse her lips and look vexed. To her credit, she imbues these extended forays into harrumphing with razor-wire tension.
Domestic abuse is hinted at rather than depicted outright. It is a decision that, for better or worse, spares the viewer from ever really feeling uncomfortable.
[ Sigourney Weaver: ‘I want to do an Irish accent’Opens in new window ]
That riotous refusal to get a move on is meanwhile revealed to be a strength. In Alice’s world, silence is never just silence. And the shadows that spread through her family home every evening are gradually confirmed as hiding terrible secrets. Calmly, creepily, by doing very little, this bizarre, hypnotic show gets under your skin and leaves a chill.
