There are few films this year as ambitious as director Julian Schnabel’s In the Hand of Dante. Combining manuscript mystery, gangster thriller and spiritual odyssey, the film moves between medieval Italy and the 21st-century criminal underworld in pursuit of questions about creativity, faith, power and redemption.
This film is a big, gutsy gamble. Casting a heavily costumed Martin Scorsese in an acting role with overwrought philosophical dialogue was always going to be a risk. Your enjoyment of it will hinge on your ability to tolerate its tonal dissonance. At various points it functions as a black comedy, an earnest exploration of art and its creation, a spiritual romance and a gangster thriller. Schnabel appears determined to make all four at once.
Adapted from Nick Tosches’ cult novel, of the same name, Schnabel’s sprawling literary crime drama attempts to bridge centuries and genres. At the centre of the story lies a discovered manuscript of Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy, passed through the hands of collectors, academics and gangsters.
High culture and organised crime
Oscar Isaac occupies two time lines here: playing both novelist Nick Tosches in 2001 and Dante himself in medieval Italy. The manuscript takes on mythical significance, drawing characters towards it with varying mixtures of greed, reverence and curiosity.
The first act of the film is the strongest. The 2001 storyline unfolds as an absorbing literary detective story, with intriguing questions surrounding the manuscript’s authenticity. The process of its authentication becomes a suspenseful investigation, while the criminal interests circling the document create a constant sense of danger.
Schnabel stages this material in stark black and white, giving the film a hallucinatory quality. His approach suits the film’s unlikely mixture of scholarship and extreme violence, where discussions about literature and cultural inheritance plunge into the brutal world of organised crime.
The collision between high culture and organised crime is frequently fascinating, even if the abrupt shifts in tone occasionally produce a sense of whiplash. At times, though, the juxtaposition veers close to parody. Earnest reflections on art, redemption and spiritual longing are delivered by an array of heavily costumed Hollywood stars (John Malkovich, Scorsese, Isaac) before the film abruptly returns to gangsters, shoot-outs and criminal conspiracy. This contrast – which sits at the heart of Schnabel’s vision – is intriguing, but it does not always convince.
The cast embraces the film’s unusual ambitions. Isaac brings conviction to both roles, navigating the demands of a dual performance without reducing either character to a simple reflection of the other. The medieval scenes chart Dante’s artistic and spiritual development, while the 2001 narrative allows Isaac to play a man caught between intellectual fascination and dangerous circumstances.
Gerard Butler’s Louie is a character who embodies many of the film’s contradictions. Violent, philosophical and frequently darkly comic, Louie can feel closer to a cartoon than a fully rounded character. Butler nevertheless commits fully to the role, embracing its extremes without a hint of self-consciousness.
The result is bizarre, often absurd and consistently memorable. Elsewhere, familiar faces drift through the story, including Al Pacino, Jason Momoa and Gal Gadot. Their appearances contribute to the sense that Schnabel has assembled a cinematic fever dream rather than a conventional ensemble drama.
Alongside the manuscript mystery runs Dante’s own journey. These medieval sequences trace his artistic and spiritual awakening, charting the experiences that would shape one of the most influential works in Western literature.
Alex Majoli / Netflix
Schnabel approaches this material with obvious reverence. Medieval Italy is rendered as a landscape of imagination and symbolism. The film’s treatment of female characters (Gal Gadot’s Beatrice and Giulietta, and Sabrina Impaccatore’s Susanna Pelice) is similarly symbolic. They function as sources of inspiration, temptation or spiritual guidance rather than fully realised people.
As the story progresses, philosophical reflection displaces the momentum established in the opening hour. The manuscript mystery recedes into the background as the characters drift in and out of focus and scenes unfold according to what feels like dream logic rather than dramatic progression. What begins as a gripping literary thriller evolves into something increasingly abstract and elusive.
That tension defines In the Hand of Dante. Schnabel reaches for something vast, attempting to connect artistic creation, spiritual longing and criminal violence within a single work. While the scale of that ambition gives the film its character, it also explains why parts of it may feel frustratingly out of reach.
At a time when so much cinema feels carefully calibrated and thoroughly familiar, there is something refreshing about a film willing to embrace risk on this scale. In The Hand of Dante is messy, eccentric and frequently bewildering. It is also inventive, visually striking and impossible to confuse with anything else released this year.
Like the manuscript that drives its plot, In The Hand of Dante attracts both admiration and scepticism. Mysterious, unwieldy and often captivating, it refuses easy categorisation. The question of whether Schnabel has made a great film here is open to debate. Some viewers will find it profound and others will find it ridiculous. Both responses feel entirely reasonable. He has certainly made one that nobody else would have attempted.
