The Door In The Floor explores the complexities of love, revealing secrets that betray the heartache of loss. Written and directed by Tod Williams, it is adapted from one third of John Irving's best-selling novel A Widow For One Year.

Starring Academy Award winner Kim Basinger and Academy Award nominee Jeff Bridges, the film is set in the coastal community of East Hampton, New York, and charts one summer in the lives of children's book writer Ted Cole (Bridges) and his beautiful but distant wife Marion (Basinger). Their once great marriage has been hit for six by some sort of tragedy.

The Coles have one child that they dote on, brightly innocent four-year-old Ruth (Elle Fanning) - if she can cope with things, the adults can't. Marion is looking for love and a soul mate and Ted is content to be selfish and play away from home whenever he feels like it. In many ways, their relationship is similar to the central one in Ang Lee's The Ice Storm.

When young student Eddie O'Hare (Jon Foster) arrives at the house, hired by Ted to work as his summer assistant, he finds himself becoming an unwitting pawn, patiently putting up with Ted's eccentricities and being led to bed by Marion, once he has revealed, in one or two hilariously embarrassing scenes, the depth of his infatuation for her.

The Door In The Floor contains offbeat humour, which neatly offsets the tragedy at the heart of the film. It's also nicely played, with Bridges producing his usual strand of eccentricity to which is added a form of selfishness that seems to come with being a famous author. Particularly good though is Basinger as a mother wanting more from a wounded marriage, rocked by the memory of a painful incident.

As a tome about love and loss, it has its merits, particularly as you identify freely with the difficult predicament outsider Eddie finds himself in. I would have to say, however, that it didn't move me in quite the way that The Ice Storm did.