Netflix's Dante Adaptation Is a Beautifully Shot Mess With Too Many Stars

Julian Schnabel’s adaptation of Nick Tosches’novel In the Hand of Dante arrives on Netflix as a visually stunning catastrophe, the kind of prestige project that somehow assembles Oscar Isaac, Gal Gadot, Gerard Butler, Al Pacino, Martin Scorsese, Jason Momoa, and John Malkovich and still manages to feel fundamentally confused about what story it’s actually trying to tell.

The premise seems promising enough on paper. A contemporary writer named Nick Tosches gets pulled into a shadowy world when mobsters recruit him to authenticate a manuscript stolen from the Vatican archives—allegedly the original draft of Dante Alighieri’s The Divine Comedy. It’s the kind of high-stakes literary mystery that screams Dan Brown thriller: secret codes, hidden compartments, chases through cobblestone streets. Instead, the film (like Tosches’source novel) keeps jumping between 2001 and the 14th century, with Isaac playing both the modern Tosches and Dante himself, a decision meant to suggest some profound parallel between the two writers that mostly just underlines how little the filmmakers understand about either one.

The real problem isn’t the ambition—it’s the fundamental misreading of who Dante actually was. Schnabel and Tosches reimagine the medieval epic poet as a 19th-century Romantic rebel, all unruly passion and pagan wildness, seemingly allergic to the Christian God and monotheism. But the historical Dante wasn’t raging against the machine. He was a devout Catholic who produced a 14,233-line exegesis on the Christian afterlife. He was also a practical politician—exiled, dependent on aristocratic patronage, happy to populate the circles of Hell with his personal enemies. His obsession with numbered categories of sin and hierarchical order wasn’t oppressive constraint; it was architecture he believed in.

Tosches, by contrast—both the real writer and his fictional stand-in here—subscribed to what the critic calls the Anxious Masculine, a peculiarly American paranoia that creative work is inherently unmanly. So writers had to prove themselves ballsy: drink, fight, seduce, surround themselves with dangerous men who dispensed flinty wisdom. The film finds its“heart”in a moment when Tosches wins approval from Butler’s sociopathic hit man simply by refusing to extinguish his cigarette during a private flight to Italy. That tells you everything about the movie’s spiritual priorities.

The 14th-century sequences are drowning in cod-Shakespearean dialogue and vaguely British accents. When Gal Gadot (as Dante’s wife, Gemma) asks,“Was not the blood of friendship of greater value than the honeyed wine of verse?”you’re less moved by medieval devotion than by the sheer silliness of the enterprise. And then there’s the scene where Gadot appears naked on a clamshell hovering over the ocean à la Botticelli’s Venus, at which point the entire film has surrendered any claim to coherence.

Even the contemporary mystery makes no sense. Isaac spouts impressive-sounding palaver about vellum types and radiocarbon dating while handling priceless historical documents with his bare hands—when any real archivist would be screaming. Gerard Butler seems to be the only actor who realizes how campy the whole thing is, which gives his performance a knowing energy that almost makes it work. Everyone else appears to be trapped in different movies entirely, wondering how they got talked into this.

The real scandal isn’t that Netflix threw star power at an unworkable premise. It’s that a novel and film this confused about its own subjects—both Dante and Tosches—somehow convinced themselves they had something to say about either one.