The Brooklyn Rail

Across Julian Schnabel’s filmography, centered as it is on singular artists, the throughline has never been biography but being. His interpretations of fellow writers and painters—Reinaldo Arenas’s literary dissidence in Before Night Falls, Jean-Dominique Bauby’s linguistic escape in The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, and Vincent van Gogh’s sensory ingenuity in At Eternity’s Gate—constellate around memory, survival, and cinematic reincarnations that traverse time and space.

Schnabel’s empathy is melancholic and metatextual: he invites us to experience the world as his subjects once experienced it, to sense the nearness of those they loved, and to relive the delicate joys that sustained them. It is through this lineage of shared visions and refracted selves that In the Hand of Dante culminates, unfurling from the canonical poet’s inner reveries into a sweeping mythos.

This ambitious collision of historical epic and crime noir sets off in early-2000s New York, where a subdued Oscar Isaac plays Nick Tosches, author of the 2002 novel the film is adapted from. Nick is pulled out of self-isolation when a mafia don, honed into chilling dark humor by John Malkovich, summons him to authenticate and steal a manuscript rumored to be Dante Alighieri’s original Divine Comedy. Drawn into an ultraviolent orbit, Nick teams up with Gerard Butler’s sadistic henchman Louie, and the pair embark on a killing spree to seize the priceless text.

From there, the narrative alternates between this gangland ordeal and fourteenth-century Italy, where an existential Dante (Isaac in his dual role) navigates political exile and spiritual awakening under the guidance of Isaiah, brought to life by a serene, transformative Martin Scorsese. Gradually, the timelines braid both men’s quests into a single continuum, cementing them as equal advocates for love, beauty, and the divine across seven centuries.

Casting Gal Gadot as both Dante’s real-life wife Gemma and Nick’s twin flame Giulietta, Schnabel fuses the poet’s belated recognition of true love into the author’s happily-ever-after in a tropical paradise. The two entwining arcs anchor romance as an undying, all-encompassing force. Around this axis, the director settles into his recurrent theme of doubling—Nick as Dante, Dante as Nick​—much as his earlier inspirations like Arenas, Bauby or van Gogh once crystallized as conduits through which he himself could see.

This recursive identification becomes even more resonant in light of co-writer and co-editor Louise Kugelberg—also Schnabel’s wife. Their creative and romantic partnership behind the scenes tilts the film deeper into its labyrinth of mirrored perspectives, where the maker and the made reflect one another.

Kugelberg and co-editor Marco Spoletini pace Dante’s passage with a ceremonial rhythm: long takes that hover over coastal horizons and stately fortresses, and slow dissolves that let the poet’s extradition drift across the frame. Nick’s spiral, by contrast, is cut with a kinetic, choppy momentum: bursts of blood-soaked detours, explosive pulpy shootouts, and hardboiled philosophical asides. The effect borders on excess yet is never boring, ricocheting between theological inquiry and gangster frenzy with volatile pulses.

Cinematographer Roman Vasyanov reinforces this bifurcation with two distinct visual systems. The fourteenth-century odyssey is suffused with painterly deliberation—its landscapes and cathedrals rendered in broad, medieval strokes. Nick’s criminal underworld counters with monochrome images, boxed into abrasive spaces. Compared with the trembling POV shots in Schnabel’s previous projects, the camerawork here is formalist, befitting the heavyset film’s shift from inhabiting the artists’ subjectivity to tracing the universality among artistic lives.

The somber score, crafted by Benjamin Clementine, blends lush orchestration and glassine piano, bridging sacredness and humanity while smoothing the film’s sharpest tonal leaps. Clementine’s collaboration with Schnabel—both as composer and as a paradoxical Mephistopheles stationed at the portal of heaven—becomes a structural spine. In its crescendos and glimmers, his music conducts the film’s movements and extends Schnabel’s search for transcendence.

When I sat down with Schnabel at his West Village home, he spoke of this passion project as a summation of his lifetime spent with artists—loving them, losing them. His mind moved laterally, holding the living and the dead at once. And he kept returning to a line Isaiah delivers to Dante: “You’ve lifted the veil on the inexpressible … you’ve become the poem.” The way he lingered on it made me feel as though this were the one wish he holds dearest. “I was holding Lou Reed in my arms before he died,” he told me. “And I told him: you’ve become the poem.” In the Hand of Dante is Schnabel’s own becoming.

In the Hand of Dante premiered at the 82nd Venice International Film Festival in September 2025 and later opened Tribeca Festival Lisboa in October.