When an actor has a filmography that includes the likes of Taxi Driver, Silence of the Lambs and Panic Room, it must be hard to pick one you’d say is underrated. Jodie Foster‘s answer is a mid-1980s comedy that sees her star alongside Rob Lowe and Wilford Brimley.

“It’s an acquired taste, that film,” Foster says about the Tony Richardson-directed movie adaptation of the John Irving book of the same name, Hotel New Hampshire. Set in the 1950s, the film sees the Berrys family open a hotel in (unsurprisingly) New Hampshire, part of the New England region of the US. The story weaves itself through the exploits of the family, including the stuffing of the recently deceased family dog, resulting in Wilford Brimley’s ‘Bob’ suffering a heart attack, a move to Europe to take over a hotel in Vienna (which gets renamed to Hotel New Hampshire), along with sexual assaults and love affairs.

Foster explains: “I think it made people feel really uncomfortable”, perhaps referring to the film’s less-than-desirable box office loss upon its release. “Like most John Irving things, it has a fantastical element and a really mundane element to it, and you don’t know which one you’re in at all times.”

Irving’s work is famous for themes of suffering and alienation, both of which are apparent in Hotel New Hampshire’s plot but difficult to discern from the film’s more family-friendly outward appearance. Speaking his opinion on the film’s reception, Rob Lowe is quoted as saying, “Orion releases Hotel New Hampshire with a cartoon of a bear: people thought they were going to see Garfield the Cat.”

Despite the lack of financial acclaim for the movie, Foster still holds it in regard, seemingly also down to her own experiences on set. “I have such fond memories of Montreal. I keep friends from that film.”

Lowe would call Foster “the greatest American actress, director and friend anyone could ever have”. In 2011, almost 30 years on from their time together on the set of Hotel New Hampshire.

Whether it’s nostalgia for a time spent on a set that garnered her some lifelong friends or a true love of the more misunderstood entries in her career, it’s hard to say that Hotel New Hampshire isn’t underrated, considering the cast that lends their talents to its strange, somewhat uncomfortable plot.

While cast alone isn’t enough to save a bad movie, perhaps the more forgotten films of the early years of some of our most venerated actors are with a revisit, with a more open mind and an idea to view them through the lens of a modern understanding and without the expectation of, in the case of Hotel New Hampshire, a family-friendly romp, but rather a film that speaks to something distinctly more nuanced and complex. Something that an actor like Jodie Foster would watch and consider her more underrated performances.