Isaac Newton spent as much time chasing alchemy and biblical prophecy as he did inventing calculus, and this biography refuses to soften that contradiction. Actors play out scenes from his life at Woolsthorpe and Cambridge, mixing dramatized moments with historians and scientists who walk through his notebooks, his secretive experiments with mercury, and the religious heresies he kept hidden from colleagues at the Royal Society. The film traces him from a solitary, difficult childhood through the plague years that forced him back to his family farm, where he worked out gravity and optics largely alone, to his later years as a feared and autocratic president of the Royal Society. His own writings, quoted throughout, reveal a man as consumed by unlocking the secrets of God and matter through alchemy as by the laws of motion he is remembered for. The result is less hagiography than character study, showing genius and obsession as the same trait pointed in different directions.