In the early 2000s, Nick Tosches (Oscar Isaac) sits down with his friend to rant about the state of the publishing industry and his love for Dante Alighieri's The Divine Comedy.
After a series of flashbacks, side plots, and introducing seemingly random characters, including a homophobic mob enforcer, Louie (Gerard Butler), Nick gets hired by a Mafia boss (John Malkovich) to confirm the authenticity of Dante’s manuscript that’s generally considered non-existent. While this plot unfolds, riddled with Nick’s explanations about signatures and watermarks, in the 14th century, Dante himself (also played by Isaac) is struggling in his personal life and sacred quest, as well as with finishing his opus magnum.
There are certain things that the audience has come to expect from a Julian Schnabel movie after such works as Basquiat, Before Night Falls, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, and At Eternity’s Gate: A metamorphosis of artistic spirit into reality, a spiritual journey that transcends the limitations of a physical form. While hints of those ideas can be visible in Schnabel’s latest work, In the Hand of Dante, what becomes more undeniably evident upon watching the film is that something must have gone terribly wrong in the process of making it.
Indeed, In the Hand of Dante has been in a sort of development purgatory for many years. Nick Tosches’ eponymous book was first optioned in 2008 by Johnny Depp, who intended to produce the film and star as both protagonists in it. As time went by and Schnabel got attached to the project, as well as a whole new slate of actors, with Oscar Isaac replacing Depp, a lot has obviously changed in the cinematic world and outside of it.
Even in 2002, when Tosches’ book was initially published, it was a prose bogged down by baffling writing choices, self-indulgent rants, and whole paragraphs of bragging about sexual prowess. At the same time, similar movies successfully existed throughout the aughts, and you can easily imagine that with the right self-aware tone and a lot of tongue-in-cheek irony, such a version of In the Hand of Dante could’ve worked, possibly directed by Guy Ritchie. Some actors in Schnabel’s film seem to actually exist in this hypothetical, pulpy version; most notably, Butler, whose whole presence and dialogue ostensibly belong to a different onscreen reality and genre.
Therein lies another major issue of the film we did receive: there is a great disconnect between everything and everyone in it, and while there are bits and pieces of postmodern irony here and there, the whole thing is actually not self-aware at all. In fact, it’s as serious as a heart attack, and its underlying pathos, tragically emphasized by Nick’s nonsensical, rambling narration, the movie’s bloated runtime, and the surprising flatness of the black-and-white imagery in contemporary scenes, proves to be its undoing.
On the one hand, the film has Gerard Butler going on memorable spiels about tiny dogs’ poo and Jason Momoa as a cartoonish villain in a white suit and a ridiculously gigantic hat, embracing full camp. On the other hand, it’s also a film where Martin Scorsese, in a full beard, appears to deliver unexpected religious wisdom to Dante, while Oscar Isaac and Gal Gadot, playing his romantic interest in both timelines, make loud proclamations of their undying love by pledging to wait 700 years to be together again.
For all its stumbles and discords, In the Hand of Dante could’ve at least been an engaging, entertaining mess. Unfortunately, what we are left with afterwards are a few obvious jokes involving the comparison between this film and the creation of Isaac’s character from another one.
The film enjoyed its New York premiere at the 2026 Tribeca Festival. Visit the film's page at the official festival site for more information. The film will debut June 24 on Netflix.