In 1321, Dante Alighieri (Oscar Isaac) published one of Italy’s finest achievements in literature, “The Divine Comedy.” The original manuscript had been deemed lost, until, in 2001, Joe Black (John Malkovich), an influential art dealer, was made aware of its discovery. Wanting it for his own gain, he taps his trusted enforcer Louie (Gerard Butler) to retrieve the text, but before he can sell it to make his retirement fortune, it must first be authenticated. To assist in the verification, Dante expert Nick Tosches (also Isaac) is brought into the plot, but being so close to the text to which he dedicated his life proves to be the man’s ultimate temptation.

Julian Schnabel directs In the Hand of Dante from a script he co-wrote with Louise Kugelberg, adapting Nick Tosches’ 2002 novel of the same name; yes, a work of intellectual self-insertion. The film premiered at the 2025 edition of the Venice International Film Festival after a long and fraught production ordeal, eventually landing distribution through Netflix. At 153 minutes, the dual narrative splits time between modern times, shot in black and white by Roman Vasyanov, and early Renaissance Italy, which was shot with painterly color.

Beyond the dual structure, Dante also opts to tell its story in a not quite linear fashion, and while for most of the film this is not an issue, the first act of the film is particularly disorienting. We learn quickly enough about the two timelines and their visual distinctness, as well as to expect the cast to play dual roles after quickly leaving Isaac’s Dante on the steps of a remote Sicilian island to Isaac, now as Nick, being boisterous in a bar in New York City. Just as quickly, though, we are transported back to a memory of Nick’s in which his younger self (Ibrahim Elouahabi) tells his uncle (Al Pacino) that he just killed a boy in an apparent act of self-defense. From there, the narrative leaps to following Louie for a long scene at a local bar where he interrogates the manager (Duke Nicholson), accusing him of cheating his boss. For a narrative following a moderately large ensemble across centuries, that the first act is a bit unwieldy is not necessarily a concern, but the frustrating thing is that these first two major scenes occupying a good twenty minutes of runtime do not really move anything forward. Schnabel starts his narrative already treading water, something that will happen again very shortly after meeting Malkovich’s Joe as he tells the story of Don Lecco (Lorenzo Zurzolo), pushing us near the one-hour mark before finally allowing the film to take shape. To be fair to Schnabel, here, Lecco (Franco Nero) is in possession of Dante’s original manuscript, and while his story tells us how he came to be its keeper, the entire process is one that reads better on the page than plays out on screen, at least given how laborious these sequences are conceived. On its own, any of these three false starts make for engaging jumping-off points for stories, but none of these are the actual story which Schnabel is looking to tell.

Thankfully, though, once Schnabel sets the table, the rest of the film is quite fun even if it does get a little long in the tooth. Isaac really takes over the narrative come the second act as he convinces Joe that the document needs to be authenticated before he can hope to sell it. To do so, the scholar must travel around the world to get the seal embedded in the documents analyzed for authenticity, carbon dating of the paper and ink, and finally confirm the handwriting is that of Dante Alighieri. Given that the actual heist of the documents – and reaching even further back in the timeline of the film, the discovery of the manuscript – is treated as an aside, it would have behooved the film to expand more on the authentication, but Schnabel and Kugelberg treat these trials as mere plot points on the page despite Schnabel dedicating substainal time to them once played out in front of the lens. It makes for a disjointed experience at best, and at worst a frustrating one, because the filmmaking is implying an incredible amount of effort into these tasks that the writing just does not live up to. Between the number 3 playing such a huge role in the structure of Dante’s work and the establishment of a dual narrative, audiences cannot be blamed for subconsciously assuming that these steps of verification would take Nick on a modern journey through Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso, or that the conclusions the various experts arrive at would be conveyed through greater overlapping of the two time periods covered in the film akin to Tom Stoppard’s play Arcadia.

Examining the film as presented, the majority takes place in the present, and Schnabel delivers an exciting procedural thriller tied to the Antiquity. Isaac is believable in all aspects of his role here, though let down by the unwieldy script. He can play both the proud and almost belligerent frustrated academic that we see in the bar with enough conviction that we also believe his arc as he begins to go toe to toe with Joe and his mob. There is always a sense of rich fantasy here, so the larger-than-life turns which the narrative takes are never so much as to pull us out of the story, and under Isaac’s shepherding of the audience, we become caught up in the thrill of it all. In the Hand of Dante allows us close access to experts in their field, giving us a peek behind the curtain and a glimpse of knowledge that has been foundational to our existence as a cultural species. Nick is not as much of a museum dwelling gumshoe as Robert Langdon (Tom Hanks) in The DaVinci Code (2026) – based off of a Dan Brown novel published two years after Tosches’ and stealing the later’s lunch in the process – nor is he as hardened a criminal as Butler’s Louie so he becomes a bit of a chameleonic character that can fit the needs of the scene, yet narrtiviley, he is seldom forced to grow, adapt, and change or crumble under the weight of this new world he finds himself trust into in ways that we can foster a connection with from our side of the screen. More focus on his arc instead of just the scope of the story would have greatly helped the effectiveness of the film as a whole, but what does make it to the screen presents enough interesting aspects to keep audiences engaged and entertained.

Parallel to Nick’s descent is the far less successful story of the titular Dante. There is an attempt to let the past color in and inform the gaps of the present-day storyline through dual casting and foggily mirrored storylines, but most of the time spent in the past is building a loose foundation for a romantic arc with Giulietta / Gemma Donati (Gal Gadot), or Dante meandering through loose philosophy with Isaiah (Martin Scorsese). While the colors are rich and inviting, not dissimilar to the tones of oil on canvas from the time, the story here slows down to a near halt. Without a stronger bridge to Nick’s story in the present, it feels like an elaborate aside that is not actually informing us of anything that Nick has not already shown us or experienced. It becomes like padding, filling out that narrative with extra prose that would not be at home in Alighieri’s meticulous meter, so it becomes almost an antithesis to the actual narrative. While we are spared scenes of Dante hunched over a candle-lit desk or composing his rhymes to the vastness of space à la Paul Mescal hamming it up as William Shakespeare in Hamnet (2025), the Dante we do spend time with is wholly anonymous. His time in this story seldom pushes the narrative forward, and because his story is the B Plot against Nick’s, the fragmentation does little favor to the overall arc of the film. Rather, these scenes are treated as easy ways to convey the passing of time across Nick’s story. Bound by Alligheri’s own record in history, Schnabel and Kugelberg may not have been able to line up the climax of their dual-role hero’s story as well as they would had this been a work of pure fiction, but had they either focused themselves and found an actual plot for Dante to take part in, or adjust how Nick’s plot found resolution, they could have produced a much more propulsive finale for their film instead of one that plays out as passively as it does here.

In the Hand of Dante is a bold swing that unfortunately does not pay off as well as the individual parts of the narrative would indicate. Nothing presented is ultimately bad or poorly constructed, just misguided, and the elements do not necessarily fit well together with the other parts. Where the film succeeds, though, is in pursuit of its own convictions. Schnabel never once quivers or hesitates as he unfurls his story, even as it teeters into the realm of the absurd. Despite never coming together to be greater than the sum of its parts, each of those parts are very competently made so that the film is always an engaging and thought-provoking work. Beguiling at times both due to and in spite of its flaws, In the Hand of Dante is nothing short of an experience and one that, in a way, captures the spirit of Alighieri’s work; art which provokes thought, pondering upon what came before us and how it connects us to the present, showing that we are all united across the ages through our shared experience of humanity. Our choices in life reverberate across our own lifetimes, affecting those in our lives and those in the generations to follow, and ultimately, we, like our protagonists, must answer for those actions, in either this life or the next.