The Fountain is a 2006 American epic science fiction romantic drama film written and directed by Darren Aronofsky and starring Hugh Jackman and Rachel Weisz. Blending elements of fantasy, history, spirituality, and science fiction, the film consists of three storylines involving immortality and the resulting loves lost, and one man's pursuit of avoiding this fate in this life or beyond it. Jackman and Weisz play sets of characters bonded by love across time and space: a conquistador and his ill-fated queen, a modern-day scientist and his cancer-stricken wife, and a traveler immersed in a universal journey alongside aspects of his lost love. The storylines—interwoven with use of match cuts and recurring visual motifs—reflect the themes and interplay of love and mortality.

Aronofsky originally planned to direct The Fountain on a $70 million budget with Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett in the lead roles, but Pitt's withdrawal and cost overruns led Warner Bros. Pictures to shut it down. Aronofsky rewrote the script to be sparser and was able to resurrect the film for $35 million with Jackman and Weisz in the lead roles. Principal photography ran from November 2004 to February 2005, and mainly took place on a sound stage in Montreal, Quebec. Aronofsky used macro photography to create key visual effects for The Fountain at a low cost.

The film was released theatrically in the United States and Canada on November 22, 2006. It was a box office bomb, only grossing $16.5 million worldwide against a production budget of $35 million, and received generally mixed reviews from critics, but it has gained a cult following since its release.

Conquistador Tomás Creo in New Spain fights a band of Maya to gain entry into a pyramid, where he is attacked by a Mayan priest. The story intercuts to Tom, a traveler in the twenty-sixth century who was tending a tall tree in a glass dome biosphere traveling through space, annoyed by a woman called Izzi. Finally, a third iteration, present-day surgeon Tommy Creo, is losing his wife Izzi to a brain tumor. Tommy is working on a cure using samples from a tree found through exploration in Guatemala, which are being tested for medicinal use for degenerative brain diseases in his lab. Izzi has come to terms with her mortality, but Tommy refuses to accept it, focused on his quest to find a cure for her.

She writes a story called "The Fountain" about Queen Isabella losing her kingdom to the Inquisition and a commission given by her to Tomás Creo to search for the Tree of Life in the Central American forest in Mayan territory. As she does not expect to finish her book, Izzi asks Tommy to finish it for her. As they look up at the golden nebula of Xibalba, she imagines, as the Maya did, that their souls will meet there after death when the star goes supernova. She dies shortly thereafter, and Tommy dedicates himself to curing not only her disease but death itself after seeing experimental success in reversing aging. His colleagues fear that this drive has made him reckless, but they support him in his scientific work and emotionally at Izzi's funeral. Tommy plants a sweetgum seed at Izzi's grave in the manner of a story she told him, relating how a Mayan guide's dead father lived on in a tree nourished by the organic nutrients of the buried body.

In the Mayan jungle, Tomás finds that most of his fellow knights are exhausted and refuse to continue searching for the Tree of Life. After a failed mutiny and the death of their priest guide, he takes the few who remain loyal with him to a pyramid, carrying a ceremonial dagger. Once he arrives at the pyramid, the first scene repeats, and Tomás engages in combat with the Mayan priest. Tom (whether he is a version of Dr. Tommy Creo, an element of Izzi's story, or an incarnation of Tommy himself in the future is unclear) spends much of his time performing physical or mental exercises, including a form of meditation allowing him to perceive and interact with the past.

In the past, Tomás was stabbed in the stomach, just as the priest was about to kill him, he appeared before the figurehead. The priest now believes Tomás is the "First Father" who birthed all life. Tomás kills the priest as a sacrifice and proceeds to a pool with a large tree, convinced this is the Tree of Life. Tomás applies some of his sap to his torso and is cured of his stab wound. He drinks the sap flowing from the bark. But in a reenactment of the Mayan creation myth recounted earlier, his body is turned into flowers and grass that burst forth from it, and he literally gives rise to new life, killing himself in the process. In space, the tree finally dies just before the spaceship arrives at its destination, much to Tom's horror. A final vision of Izzi appears, comforting him in the face of his acceptance of death. The star goes supernova, engulfing the ship and everything within. Tom's body, engulfed by the dying star inside the nebula, is absorbed by the tree, causing it to flourish back to life. Izzi's apparition picks a fruit from the new tree of life and hands it to Tommy, who plants it in Izzi's grave, accepting her death and moving on.

The three stories are interwoven with match cuts and recurring visual motifs; Hugh Jackman and Rachel Weisz play the main characters in all three narratives. Whether the actions in these stories are actual events, or symbolic, is not clear: director Darren Aronofsky emphasized that the storylines in their time periods and their respective convergences were open to interpretation. The director has said of The Fountain's intricacy and underlying message, "[The film is] very much like a Rubik's Cube, where you can solve it in several different ways, but ultimately there's only one solution at the end."