The Voynich Manuscript sits in Yale's Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library covered in an unknown script and illustrations of plants that match no known species. This film follows the scientists and cryptographers who have tried to crack it, starting with William Friedman, the US Military Intelligence Service codebreaker who helped defeat Japan's Purple cipher during the Second World War and still could not make headway on the manuscript's symbols. Researchers examine its ink, pigments, and parchment for clues to when and where it was made, while historian René Zandbergen traces its documented trail back to antiques dealer Wilfrid Voynich, who found it in 1912 at Villa Mondragone near Rome among books once belonging to the seventeenth-century scholar Athanasius Kircher. The film lays out the leading theories on authorship and purpose, from coded science to elaborate hoax, without settling on one. What holds the story together is the manuscript's total resistance to every method thrown at it for over a century, professional and amateur alike.