A gorgeous, maddening film that almost earns its own ambition.

Julian Schnabel returns with In the Hand of Dante, a 2025 drama he co-wrote alongside Louise Kugelberg, loosely adapted from Nick Tosches’ 2002 novel of the same name. The story kicks off with a discovery: a handwritten copy of Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy, buried for centuries in a Vatican cellar, suddenly finds itself moving through the hands of New York mob figures before landing with Tosches himself. It’s the kind of premise that sounds unhinged on paper, and absolutely is, in the best way. The film made its debut out of competition at the 82nd Venice International Film Festival in September 2025, hit US theaters in June 2026, and is now streaming on Netflix.

Schnabel has never really been a storyteller in the traditional sense — his films have always felt more like standing in front of a massive canvas than sitting through a plot. In the Hand of Dante takes that instinct and cranks it all the way up. Whether that excites you or drains you completely depends entirely on what you came looking for.

THE STORY

Two Worlds, One Manuscript

The film’s premise is audacious: a handwritten copy of Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy, hidden for centuries in a Vatican cellar, resurfaces in the modern world, and immediately becomes the obsession of the New York mob. The manuscript passes through thieves, priests, and killers, eventually landing in the hands of Nick Tosches, a writer recruited to verify its authenticity, who finds the document pulling him into something far larger than a transaction.

Running parallel to this is the story of Dante himself, exiled from Florence, searching for meaning through philosophy, love, and the act of writing. Schnabel gives each era its own visual grammar, cutting back and forth with a rhythm that is sometimes hypnotic and sometimes simply jarring. The two timelines rhyme more than they resolve, which will frustrate viewers looking for a clean payoff but rewards those willing to sit inside the film’s strange atmosphere.

CINEMATOGRAPHY

The Screen as Canvas

This is where the film is simply beyond argument. Cinematographer Roman Vasyanov makes one of the boldest visual choices of recent memory: the 14th-century sequences are shot in warm, saturated color — rich Italian light pouring over frescoes, olive groves, and candlelit rooms — while the modern crime storyline is rendered in stark, widescreen black and white. The contrast is not merely aesthetic. It argues, quietly but insistently, that something irreplaceable was lost between Dante’s world and ours. The past glows. The present has been drained of color.

There are individual frames here that belong in a museum. Schnabel, himself a celebrated painter, uses the camera the way he uses a brush, with accumulation and texture rather than precision. Not every scene earns its visual grandeur, but the grandeur is undeniable.

The past glows. The present has been drained of color — and Schnabel knows exactly what that means.

THE CAST

A Galaxy of Faces, of Wildly Varying Quality

The ensemble here is so stacked it almost feels like a dare. Let’s take them one by one.

Oscar Isaac (Nick Tosches / Dante Alighieri)
Carries the entire film on his back — and does it. Two separate lead performances, both credible, both alive. The best work he’s ever done.

Gerard Butler (Louie / Pope Boniface VIII)
Gloriously unhinged. He plays both roles like he wandered in from a different, rowdier film — and somehow makes it work.

John Malkovich (Joe Black)
Precise and unsettling, as only Malkovich can be. Every line lands exactly where he means it to.

Martin Scorsese (Isaiah, Dante’s mentor)
Steals every scene he’s in. Deeply sincere, quietly commanding. A reminder that Scorsese was always one great role away from a second calling.

Al Pacino (Uncle Carmine)
A brief but electrifying early appearance. Sets the tone for the modern storyline with full-throttle Pacino energy.

Jason Momoa (Rosario)
The film’s most significant misfire. Momoa looks the part but feels stranded — an actor in a film that has outgrown the tools he’s brought.

Gal Gadot, as Giulietta, is given less to work with than the role deserves. She’s not without presence, but the part is underwritten in ways that no performance could entirely fix.

DIRECTIONS THEMES

Schnabel’s Beautiful Mess

Schnabel is genuinely interested in the questions this film asks — about art’s survival across time, about the relationship between faith and violence, about whether sacred things can exist in a world run by greed. These are not small ambitions. The problem is that the screenplay, which he co-wrote with Louise Kugelberg, pursues these ideas with more passion than discipline. Scenes that should build toward each other instead run parallel without ever truly meeting. The Vatican and the Mafia, the medieval and the modern — they rhyme, but they don’t resolve.

The film is also about twenty minutes too long, and those twenty minutes are not evenly distributed. They tend to cluster in the modern storyline, where the mob mechanics are the least interesting thing happening, and where the screenplay leans hardest on dialogue that strains to feel philosophical while describing criminal logistics.

And yet. There is something genuinely rare here — a film with an actual point of view about what art is for, and what it costs. Even when Schnabel loses the thread, you feel the weight of what he was reaching for.on’t mind being gutted.

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The Nook’s Verdict

In the Hand of Dante is not a film you watch — it is a film you experience, argue with, and remember. Its flaws are real: an uneven screenplay, a runtime that tests patience, and a handful of performances that belong to a different movie. But Roman Vasyanov’s cinematography alone earns your two and a half hours, and Oscar Isaac does something extraordinary here. This is cinema made by someone with something to say, even when the saying gets in the way of itself.

Watch if: You love ambitious, visually driven filmmaking, or you’re an Oscar Isaac completist.
Skip if: You need a tight, coherent narrative with a satisfying ending.

★★★☆☆ 3 / 5 — flawed, unforgettable

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