‘In the Hand of Dante’ is a difficult film to categorize because it functions simultaneously as, to some extent, a biopic of Dante Alighieri set during the Renaissance and as an early-2000s gangster movie. The premise is extraordinary: the Mafia discovers that the original manuscript of Dante’s ‘Divine Comedy’ has surfaced in the basement of the Vatican, and of course they want it – not out of any reverence for literary genius, but because of its immense value.

The contemporary strand is set in New Jersey, and one of the film’s more curious stylistic choices is that the Renaissance sequences are presented in a 4:3 aspect ratio and in colour, while much of the early twenty-first-century material unfolds in black and white. There are numerous instances of doubling. Gerard Butler plays both a psychopathic modern-day mobster and Pope Boniface in the historical narrative, reinforcing the film’s fascination with recurrence and reincarnation.

The central conceit is that the mob will eliminate anyone capable of tracing the lost manuscript back to them, leading to scenes of librarians being bumped off in increasingly absurd fashion. There is also an extended cameo from Martin Scorsese, offering prophetic, rabbinical wisdom. Appropriately enough, his character is called Isaiah. Al Pacino appears early on as the uncle of the main character, dispensing valuable life lessons about standing up for oneself in situations involving both life and death.

Here, Mafia violence and literary passion collide. We catch fleeting glimpses of Beatrice, the thirteen-year-old girl Dante loved from afar but never actually spoke to, and who would go on to become the muse for the ‘Divine Comedy’. Though this is grand-scale filmmaking, not all of it makes much sense. It is wildly uneven and often all over the place, and we are invited to believe that Nick Tosches (Oscar Isaac) is the reincarnation of Dante – or perhaps not. The film continually undermines its own certainty.

In that respect, ‘In the Hand of Dante’ may qualify both as the most ingenious plot of the year and as pretentious twaddle. It is maddening, ambitious, exasperating and utterly unlike anything else. Whether one regards it as visionary or ridiculous may depend entirely on one’s tolerance for a film that so gleefully blurs the line between the profound and the preposterous.