Ever since Alien, no one has had any trouble seeing Sigourney Weaver in the role of ballbreaker-in-chief. More than forty years on from Ripley, she’s still at it. In The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart (Amazon Prime Video) she wears a broad-brimmed hat and totes a big gun as she defends her terrain against undesirables. So far, so Sigourney.
The enemy here is not in outer space, where no one can hear you scream, but the Outback: a florid little patch of Australia where June Hart (Weaver) runs a horticultural nursery that doubles as a women’s refuge. Hence the gun, also the hat. But June’s true method of resistance is a counterintuitive shock. When a wife-beater, fresh out of prison, discovers the whereabouts of her sanctuary, she traces him to a bar in town and goads him into beating her up. Self-sacrificially, she takes the blows of patriarchal rage so the women she protects don’t have to. It wouldn’t have worked in the Alien franchise.
But all this comes in the second episode. The first, set far away by the sea, establishes that June’s son Clem (Charlie Vickers) is a brute who thrashes not only his pregnant wife Agnes (Tilda Cobham-Hervey) but also their daughter Alice (Alyla Browne). Or he does until Alice, a dreamy little thing with a vengeful imagination powered by reading, deals him a fiery comeuppance. Which is how, once an orphan, she too is rescued by her grandmother and planted in the refuge.