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By the late 21st century, Earth is in steep decline, gripped by environmental catastrophe and the steady collapse of technological advancement. The entire planet faces catastrophic agricultural failure due to recurring dust storms and widespread crop disease.  Technology is limited, and children are being taught that space exploration was an elaborate hoax by the US government. Joseph Cooper (played by Matthew McConaughey), a widower and former NASA pilot, now works as a farmer in the American Midwest. With the help of his father-in-law Donald (John Lithgow), he is raising his two children—Murph (Mackenzie Foy), a bright and precocious 10-year-old, and Tom (Timothée Chalamet), a quiet and dependable 15-year-old.

Murph begins to observe strange occurrences near the bookshelf in her room, which she believes are signs of a “ghost.” Though Cooper initially dismisses her claims as childish imagination, he urges her to think scientifically and search for a logical explanation. During a particularly intense dust storm, Cooper notices that the dust patterns that settle on Murph’s bedroom floor form binary coordinates. He follows them, unaware that Murph has secretly stowed away in his truck, and they arrive at a hidden NASA facility buried deep in the Midwestern countryside. There, they are intercepted and briefly separated by TARS, a reprogrammed military robot acting as a guard.

At the facility, they meet Professor John Brand (Michael Caine) and his daughter, Dr. Amelia Brand (Anne Hathaway). Cooper learns that he’s stumbled into the remains of NASA. Brand has discovered a wormhole near Saturn, which he believes has been placed there by an unknown, advanced alien civilization. This wormhole connects Earth’s galaxy to distant galaxies, which Brand hopes might contain planets suitable for human habitation. NASA previously launched the Lazarus missions to explore the possibility. Three astronauts—doctors Miller, Mann, and Edmunds—returned promising data via binary signals. NASA now wants to send another crew through the wormhole to confirm if any of these worlds can support human life. 

Professor Brand outlines two potential plans: Plan A involves solving a ferociously difficult gravitational equation to move humanity off Earth and into space colonies, while Plan B centers on colonizing another world using human embryos kept in cryostasis. Opting for Plan B would mean abandoning those left behind on Earth, but ensuring the survival of the species through a so-called “population bomb.” Cooper reluctantly agrees to pilot the Endurance mission when pressed by Professor Brand, believing it to be his only chance to save his family. Yet he also knows that by agreeing to go, he may be leaving his children behind forever. Murph is devastated; she believes the “ghost” has warned him not to leave and tries desperately to stop him. Cooper gives her a watch as a keepsake and promises to return, weeping as he says goodbye.

After a two-year journey spent in cryostasis, the crew—Cooper, Amelia Brand, Doyle, Romilly, and the robots TARS and CASE—arrive at Saturn and pass through the wormhole. Their first destination is Miller’s planet, which orbits dangerously close to a supermassive black hole named Gargantua. The immense gravitational pull of Gargantua causes severe time dilation: each hour on the planet’s surface equals seven years on Earth. When Cooper, Brand, and Doyle descend to the surface, they find it covered in a shallow ocean. But towering waves, generated by the planet’s violent gravitational forces, rise with terrifying speed behind their ship. Brand slogs through the low water, determined to retrieve valuable data from Miller’s wrecked lander, but soon finds herself in imminent danger. As the wave surges toward them, TARS races across the water to rescue Brand, hauling her back into the ship moments before impact. The wave crashes into them, killing Doyle and severely damaging the lander. Stranded and racing against time, Cooper and Brand struggle to make urgent repairs, aware that every moment spent there costs them years on Earth. By the time they return to the Endurance, they find Romilly aged by 23 years.

Back on Earth, Murph (now played by Jessica Chastain) has grown into adulthood and works alongside Professor Brand at NASA, helping him attempt to solve the gravitational equation that could make Plan A a reality. Despite the equation’s seemingly insurmountable difficulty, she clings to the hope that they can still find a way to save humanity. Meanwhile, aboard the Endurance, Cooper watches decades of video messages recorded and sent by his family. He learns that his father-in-law Donald has passed away, that his son Tom has grown up, married, and suffered the loss of a child, and—most devastatingly—that Murph remains pained and resentful about his departure. Cooper breaks down in anguish as he watches, helplessly, while his children age, endure heartbreak, and become emotionally broken in the span of a few short minutes.

Cooper, Brand, and Romilly are running out of fuel and are forced to choose between the remaining two planets. They select Mann’s planet because they are receiving positive data transmissions from the surface, despite Brand advocating for Edmunds’ planet. Cooper correctly guesses that she’s in love with him, which Brand confirms. Upon their arrival, the team awaken a startled Mann from cryostasis. He initially claims that the planet has a habitable surface. Meanwhile, Murph sends a message to the Endurance revealing Professor Brand’s deathbed confession. The gravitational equation cannot be solved, and Plan A was never viable. As Cooper and Mann embark on a reconnaissance mission to the planet’s alleged surface, Mann admits to Cooper that he falsified data to make sure he’d be rescued. In an attempt to commandeer the ship, he attacks Cooper and disconnects his air supply. He leaves Cooper for dead, but Brand and TARS rescue him. Romilly dies when Mann’s booby-trapped robot aide KIPP explodes. Mann steals one of the Endurance's detachable landers and attempts to dock it with the main ship, hoping to take control of the mission himself. Desperate to escape, he overrides safety protocols and tries to dock manually despite repeated warnings. The maneuver fails catastrophically: the hatch depressurizes, causing a violent explosion that kills Mann instantly and sends the Endurance spinning out of control.

Cooper and Brand manage to regain control of the damaged Endurance through a series of death-defying high-speed docking maneuvers. Knowing they don’t have enough fuel to reach Edmunds’ planet, they decide to use Gargantua’s immense gravity as a slingshot to propel the ship closer. To achieve this, Cooper sacrifices himself and TARS, detaching their lander from the Endurance so that it falls into the black hole, allowing Brand and the robot CASE to continue on toward the new world. As Cooper and TARS plunge into Gargantua, they don’t meet the instant destruction they expected. Instead, they find themselves inside a mysterious multidimensional structure known as the tesseract.

Inside the tesseract, Cooper discovers he can interact with moments from Murph’s past through gravitational anomalies. He realizes he was Murph’s "ghost" all along, and desperately tries to send a message to himself in the past to “stay” on Earth. He then uses gravitational signals to communicate important data collected by TARS from within the black hole, encoding this information through Morse code onto the watch he had left Murph to remember him by. Murph discovers and decodes these signals when she returns to their family home to try and evacuate Tom’s wife and children from the farm, as its air has become unbreathable. The data Cooper sends enables Murph to solve the gravitational equation, making Plan A and humanity’s mass departure from Earth newly possible. 

Having fulfilled its purpose, the tesseract collapses, and Cooper and TARS are ejected back into space. Cooper regains consciousness aboard Cooper Station, a NASA facility-turned-space habitat named in honor of his now elderly daughter, Murph. He reunites with her briefly at her deathbed. Murph, surrounded by her own children and grandchildren, tells him she loves him but urges him to leave—her family is with her now, and his place is elsewhere. Meanwhile, Brand has successfully landed on Edmunds’ planet. Although Edmunds himself is dead, she establishes the beginnings of a new colony. Determined to join her and help build a future for humanity, Cooper commandeers a ship and sets out to find her.

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