In Adaptation, The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart is Changed for the Better

The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart Adaptation Embraces Change in its Exploration of Nature and Grief

Holly Ringland’s debut fiction novel The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart focuses on one young woman’s journey through a traumatic adolescence and an even rockier adulthood. The book was released in 2018 to solid reviews, favoring Ringland’s flowery language and sprawling descriptions. The main criticism though, was the characterization of Alice and the omission of depth of the novel’s supporting characters. Prime Video’s adaptation gives both aspects a needed reworking, allowing a tightened and more effective story to blossom.

Alice (Alyla Browne and later Alycia Debnam-Carey), a child who is kept within the small world of her family home, dreams of a life where she can be free in nature. Sheltered by her abusive father and browbeaten mother, the young girl’s life is unable to blossom, with no education and no friendships to be found in her near future. Sick of being trapped in the house, she leaves home when her mother and father are away and makes the trek to the town library, finding comfort in stories of make-belief and fantasy.

There, a librarian named Sally (Asher Keddie) notices Alice’s disheveled state and calls her husband, a police officer. This shifts the events of Alice’s life forever, setting off a chain of events that unravel the rest of the story. After Alice (seemingly) sets a fire that kills her mother and father, she is left comatose and then transferred into the care of her estranged grandmother June (Sigourney Weaver). June works on a flower farm, housing abuse survivors and cultivating a safe haven for them. There, Alice’s life finally has a chance to bloom.

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The show could have suffered from being a run-of-the-mill adaptation, unfolding the story identically to how the original novel evolves, but showrunner Sarah Lambert seems to know that would simply not be enough. With a visual adaptation, the story is allowed to widen its scope, with June’s flower farm and the Australian landscape symbolizing the world that Alice yearns for. Shots of the vast open fields hone in on the idea that Alice is trapped as a child with her father, but later as well with her controlling grandmother. The only place she will truly feel safe is alone in nature.

Each episode of The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart unwinds itself with the presence of nature and lost memories. From the beginning, Sally’s persistence when it comes to taking care of Alice stems from her desire to be a mother again after her child’s death. She uses Alice as a crutch to chase that dream, just as June later uses Alice to attempt to live a life through her. Each woman in the show is haunted by a memory, or person, that warps their idea of what is just and right, fracturing their relationships along the way.

A timeskip in Episode 4 unveils just how different this adaptation will be. Now, while the bones of the novel are still there, and story beats remain the same, the time skip in the series allows the creators to refocus on what kind of story they are attempting to tell. The tone changes from the whimsical becoming that 9-year-old Alice had begun to go through, to a door-slam realization in her 20’s that forces her to change. Secrets begin to unravel, and Alice is forced to reckon with the question of whether she was truly safer with June, or whether this lull in time was setting her up for a different kind of manipulation than that of her father’s cataclysmic physical abuse.

From the first episode, Lost Flowers teases a type of darkness within Alice. When she sets fire to the house that killed her mother and father, the camera shakes and wavers, the scene edited like a found footage film. It’s not quite clear if what we’re seeing is real, or if it’s a figment of Alice’s imagination. When she’s older, Alice must grapple with these ideas of violence, and whether committing them makes her a bad person as well. The relationships she makes after she runs away signal a turn for her, and for better or for worse, they allow her to acknowledge her trauma and ever-present grief.

Grief is also more fleshed out than it was in the book, with June’s wife Twig (Leah Purcell)—who was very much a side character in the novel—becoming the emotional crutch of the miniseries. Twig’s character arc is a welcomed change, becoming a central part of the show’s narrative and emotional core, and Purcell is magnetic with each turn. She takes off alone in search of a now older Alice who has disappeared, in an attempt to win the girl’s trust back. The writers allow her to fracture herself away from June’s grasp, in turn letting her become not only a more fleshed out character, but her own person.

While the novel hinted at her past and glossed over her Indigeneity, in the show, Twig’s status as an Indigenous queer Australian woman is integral to her connection to the story, June, and even Alice. It’s proof that if put in the right hands, an adaptation can buff up ideas that were present yet underutilized in the source material.

The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart proves itself as an adaptation that not only embraces change, but realizes this story would be all the better for it. In focusing on the characters who surround Alice, the show’s scope widens and so does its grasp on a broader audience. The lush scenery, while described in the book, is overruled by the cinematography in the show, shooting the Australian plains with a richness that rivals actually stepping foot on the land.

The vastness of the open Australian wilderness mirrors the unknown aspects of Alice’s life, and her willingness to leave her past behind. Sunsets burn at the edge of blue skies, and flowers bloom beneath its rays, signaling a drastic change that must be made for her and the other women in the series to heal. Secrets unfold and give way to shuddering confessions of guilt, but at its core, this miniseries is about forgiveness. Of oneself or of one’s guardians, The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart asks us to move forward with the idea that our elders were our age once, and all we can do to honor their memory is do better than they once did.

Kaiya Shunyata is a freelance pop culture writer and academic based in Toronto. They have written for Rogerebert.com, Xtra, The Daily Dot, and more. You can follow them on Twitter, where they gab about film, queer subtext, and television.

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The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart Adaptation Embraces Change in its Exploration of Nature and Grief