2026 RIIFF Filmmaker Spotlight Series: Handle With Care, Directed by Matthew James Thompson
Article Written By Cristina Sepe
Matthew James Thompson’s Handle With Care is an emotional feature film that follows a recently divorced couple, Cole and Reese, after a year-long marriage in New York City. While his divorce is being finalized, Cole is tasked with figuring out how to return or sell all of their unopened wedding gifts. As Cole completes this daunting task, he meets other captivating New Yorkers, learning a lot about life, love, and even his own faults. Thompson highlights the slow moments of conflict by using Cole, his main character, as a focal point. By taking Cole’s cynical ideas and backing them with what we see on the screen, he makes the audience believe in him until he shows his eventual inconsistencies as a narrator. By the end, we, the audience, learn that true progress requires hard choices and the sacrifices that come with that growth.
Cristina Sepe: Marriage in the media is usually portrayed differently (wedding catalogues, rom-coms), so what sparked the idea for this film?
Matthew James Thompson: I am fascinated by this idea of societal programming. Like, what do we really choose versus what is preordained or in some ways pushed on us? For instance, you always think of the big wedding with the white dress…Having spent some time within the advertising space in my adult life, I feel like it’s always interesting when you look at who’s to gain from perpetuating something. I think that’s partly a cynical view that I have.
…All the ideas of marriage are based around love and happily ever after and all these things. Then when you get to divorce, that’s the first time that you realize that the true basis of marriage is a financial arrangement. Like, “Hey, let’s take care of each other. Let’s make sure our assets are shared so that in case one person passes away,” or whatever it happens to be.
CS: There were many instances where Cole is breaking the 4th wall, and he’s questioning the old traditions in sort of a mixed media way, like the origin of the diamond ring, why people smile in photographs, and the idea of the marriage proposal. What were you hoping to accomplish with these sequences?
MJT: As much as I am sort of a traditionalist and complain about phones, social media, and technology… I do love the internet for learning things. I love being at a dinner party, and someone saying, “Where’d that come from?” So I wanted to give context and present this character as like, “Oh my gosh, they’re a really reliable source. They are doing their research. Look at how compelling their argument is.”
For instance, in the opening voiceover from Cole when he’s saying how you should never trust the narrator because they’re all lying to you. And then you realize that he is, in fact, building his case. He is an unreliable narrator. He’s giving all these examples of why these things are bad because he’s hiding the fact that he [messed] up; he is the one to blame for his situation.
CS: Ardie is Cole’s neighbor who shows up from time to time giving him new films to watch. What inspired this particular character and what does he serve as?
MJT: [He’s based on] my actual neighbor, Al, who is 96. I think he serves a few purposes. There’s so much that older generations have in terms of life experience we can learn from. But we often see them and think, “Oh, they’re antiquated. He’s giving me DVDs; who even has a DVD player anymore?”
There are so many ways in which Cole could be dismissive of him. But it was important for me to have this representation of earned wisdom in that character for Cole to see. He’s lived life, and it hasn’t always gone as planned…he’s taken big swings and struck out.
CS: Cole travels through New York City a lot, returning his gifts, which is a big part of the film. Towards the beginning, he is meeting people but is not as connected. When he continues to meet people later on, he starts learning these stories about them. I wanted to know if you had a favorite sequence and what Cole was supposed to learn.
MJT: I think most people would say this because she’s also given the most screen time, but Henrietta is definitely my favorite. I just love Catherine Curtin. And she brought so much to that role…Some of these lines I wrote when I would read them, and I’m like, “Oh man, is this a brutal line? Will anybody say this and not cringe?”… “Is anybody gonna think this is funny?”
But because of Cathy, I think she makes a character who we only hear about, and we see very briefly with maybe one line of dialogue. She makes them a human being who we miss. I think what I love, especially about Henrietta, is that we see the ending everyone wants,
portrayed through people that we would not always see…They’re atypical from a Hollywood standpoint, and we see them in such a romantic setting. To me, it felt much more true and inclusive of what love could be… And I’m very proud of that.
CS: I wanted to know more about Reese, because she’s obviously in the film, and a big part of the conflict. I feel like we don’t hear a lot of what she’s thinking or what she wants to say to Cole until the end. Is that intentional or is it something different?
MJT: I think part of the request comes because Nicole Brydon Bloom is so fantastic that you’re thinking, I want to see more of this person. And, honestly, it’s a failure of mine too; you’re writing it from your perspective. So I’m writing the male’s perspective. It’s more about his friendships and his journey. And I felt like keeping her sort of a mystery allowed us to go through that journey where we think we know everything the whole story, so when we learn more it’s a bigger reveal.
I do think [Nicole as Reese] deserves more screen time in general, but if I’m playing devil’s advocate, the ending scene maybe wouldn’t be as impactful or the note in the typewriter wouldn’t hit as hard if we had seen more of her. I think of this idea of your ex feeling like a phantom limb….I wanted her to feel present and feel the weight of that.
CS: Finally, is there anything else you’d like to share?
MJT: Oh man. I don’t know…I’ve gotten so caught up thinking about the future of a career in film or the future of cinema in general, to be honest… A lot of people ask me, “What’s next?” And I was trying to prepare for that question, and I’m like, oh, man…Making a movie, it’s so wonderful actually making it. But getting it out into the world is almost impossible in our current ecosystem.
I was at the skate park in the Lower East Side just the other day, and I saw this guy who I’ve seen over the years. His name is Mike…He said: at the end of the [Sisyphean poem], it mentioned that he is smiling. That he is choosing to do this, and that is what life is. It is a Sisyphean effort to push this boulder up the hill, and finding the joy in that is something that Cole has had to go through in his journey, and I’m feeling that and trying to find the enjoyment of it, because you think you make a movie and you’re gonna immediately sell it, and immediately do all these wonderful things. But you find yourself in the midst of this profoundly challenging task. And while tasked with it, with this boulder to push up the hill, I think you have to find a way to smile through it.
