Adapting John Irving is a famously tricky business. The sprawling emotional universes of his novels tend to resist compression, and most attempts have landed somewhere between admirable and frustrating. Tod Williams’s The Door in the Floor may be the smartest solution anyone’s found: instead of trying to cram an entire Irving epic into two hours, it adapts only the first third of A Widow for One Year and treats it as a complete story. Unseen when first released and barely registering when first released on physical media, Kino Lorber’s new Blu-ray gives this underseen gem a proper home.

The film unfolds over one pivotal summer in the Hamptons. Ted Cole (Jeff Bridges, Iron Man) is a famous children’s book author whose marriage to Marion (Kim Basinger, Final Analysis) has been quietly disintegrating since the death of their two teenage sons. Ted hires Eddie O’Hare (Jon Foster, Rampart), a young summer assistant who bears a painful resemblance to one of the lost boys. What follows is a story about grief that refuses to announce itself as one. Ted draws, drinks, and charms his way through the days. Marion barely speaks. Eddie, caught between them, becomes both a pawn in their collapse and the unlikely catalyst for something none of them expected.

Bridges is extraordinary here. Ted could have been a caricature of the self-destructive artist, but Bridges makes him funny, wounded, and infuriating in equal measure, often within the same scene. Basinger matches him with a performance that’s devastating in how little she seems to do. Marion’s grief is almost entirely internal, communicated through posture and silence more than dialogue, and Basinger makes every moment of that restraint count. It’s some of the best work she’s ever done. Keep an eye on young Elle Fanning (an Oscar nominee this year for her work in Sentimental Value) in a small but memorable supporting role — she was only five when this was filmed, and the natural talent is already unmistakable.

Williams directs with patience and restraint, letting the East Hampton setting do a lot of atmospheric work. The film shifts between tones — tragic, comic, farcical — with a confidence that mirrors Irving’s own narrative style. A late-film sequence involving Ted and a series of romantic entanglements plays like pitch-perfect farce, arriving just when you think you’ve settled into a drama. This is one of the better Irving adaptations, carried by a career-highlight Bridges & Basinger performances.

Kino Lorber’s Blu-ray comes with a solid supplements package that I wish was a bit more expansive in terms of cast participation. What we have is a commentary from Williams, a making-of featurette, a feature on Irving’s novel-to-screen process, an Anatomy of a Scene segment, and the theatrical trailer. For a film that grossed under $7 million and disappeared from theaters quickly, this feels like a rescue mission — and a welcome one.

The Door in the Floor is one of those films you only recommend to friends who genuinely trust your taste. I was lukewarm on it at first—until a close friend raved about it. Watching it again with her (thank you, Courtney!) opened it up in a whole new way. It’s not flashy, it doesn’t announce its ambitions, and it rewards your attention with moments of real emotional precision. This is exactly why physical media matters: discoveries like this, and performances worth returning to for years.