Sigourney Weaver’s terrible Aussie accent a minor blip on powerful, moving Lost Flowers of Alice Hart

Sigourney Weaver and Alyla Browne in The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart. Picture: Prime Video

Let’s just be upfront: Sigourney Weaver can’t do an Australian accent.

The Alien and Avatar superstar is front and centre in Amazon Prime’s biggest Australian production yet, The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart.

Thank god for we are getting such a raft of brilliant local Aussie offerings on our streamers – thanks to a rather controversial local content quota – and thank the heavens again that these shows are getting the mega-wattage star power of someone like Weaver behind them.

This year alone we’ve seen Miranda Otto as a creepy cult leader in Disney Plus’s The Clearing, Celeste Barber going through the health kick to end all health kicks in Netflix’s Wellmania and comic duo Kate McCartney and Kate McClennan – in the cleverest Aussie TV show since the Kates’s last outing in Get Krackin – unleashing the hilarious Deadloch on Amazon Prime. Throw in Binge’s Colin from Accounts taking over the world and that same streamer’s gorgeous second season of Love Me, and how can you blame Hollywood icons like Weaver for heading down under to join this new era of Aussie streaming greatness?

But poor old Sigourney clearly needed to watch a few more episodes of Home and Away before she got out of rehearsals.

Playing a mysterious granny and crusader for abused women, Weaver’s attempt at the Aussie drawl is a three-syllable affair.

First syllable, sounding pretty ocker. Second syllable, you think she’s got it. Third syllable, and the Aussie voice is gone – the Yankee in her can’t be contained.

But you’ll get over it pretty quick. Weaver is a powerhouse in a very dark and distressing thriller about domestic violence, the women caught in it and the women trying to fight it.

Adapted from Holly Ringland’s highly popular 2019 novel of the same name, The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart is all about a traumatised little girl (Alyla Browne) who finds a family she never knew about.

The little girl’s father (Charlie Vickers) was a monster, but her mother (Tilda Cobham-Hervey) appears to be an angel. They’re both dead in a fire and it’s not entirely clear that the child didn’t light the flame.

Enter Weaver, who whisks the little girl to the extraordinary native flower farm/abused women’s shelter she runs with her partner (a luminous Leah Purcell) and her daughter (Frankie Adams).

Accent or no accent, Weaver is incredibly commanding as the kind of gruff matriarch who always tries to do the right thing, even if she can be a bit imperious, and who won’t let the women under her roof be the victims of men any more.

And Purcell – who captivated theatre and film audiences in The Drover’s Wife and was a brilliant undercover cop in Wentworth – is great as the very warm better half to a sometimes cold Weaver.

Behind the scenes still from TV show The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart featuring Sigourney Weaver and Leah Purcell. Picture: Hugh Stewart

Asher Keddie is also brilliant as the nervy local librarian who longs to take the little girl home herself, having tried in vain to save her mother.

The real star of this show has to be the cinematography though. Lost Flowers looks incredible, capturing the beauty and terror of Australian native flora.

It can be very slow at points, and the violence is very upsetting. But – when you accept the slow pace and the very bad accent from the leading lady – Lost Flowers shows a lot of promise and has a very powerful message.

David Tennant and Michael Sheen in Good Omens. Picture: Amazon Video Prime

Amazon’s other big showing for the week is also a book adaptation, though it’s galaxies away from the Aussie flower farm.

David Tennant and Michael Sheen are back for a second season of Good Omens – the adaptation of Neil Gaiman and the late Terry Pratchett’s cult classic novel about an angel and a demon who’d rather dine at the Ritz together than engage in the ancient war between Heaven and Hell.

The first season was a dazzling thing powered by Tennant and Sheen’s chemistry – the sort that is found only once in a generation. Think Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart, Laurence Olivier and Ralph Richardson.

And it had a real grounding in the extraordinary imagination and devilish wit of Pratchett and Gaiman’s novel.

Having avoided the apocalypse and convinced the anti-Christ to go back to being a normal kid in the first season, the angel-demon pair must now deal with the archangel Gabriel (an always charming Jon Hamm) turning up naked on their doorstop.

Between Gabriel going loopy, Heaven’s bureaucratic angels getting a bit murder-y, and Hell’s demons getting very murder-y, Tennant and Sheen go on another cosmic adventure to try to stop the earth blowing up.

Sounds fun. But this second season – which is all original material – can’t quite reach the same heights as the first.

It doesn’t help that some of the starrier figures in season one – like Frances McDormand’s God – are nowhere to be seen in this sequel.

And you can sadly tell that Pratchett, creator of the excellent Discworld novels, never laid his hand on this script. It lacks the sparkle and the cleverness of the first, book-based season.

While Tennant and Sheen are still gorgeous together, this second season is a bit sluggish, a bit meandering, and a lot less shocking than its predecessor.

Rather than trying to riff off his creations, the streamers would be better trying to mine the gold of Pratchett’s other novels.

Good Omens season two has its points. But if you want to see Tennant at his cosmic best, you’re best to wait for his triumphant return to Doctor Who, set for later in the year.

The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart, streaming on Amazon Prime from August 4. Good Omens, streaming on Amazon Prime now.