Film

Harold and Maude

A boy who fakes elaborate suicides for fun falls for a bomb-toting, art-thieving eighty-year-old at a stranger's funeral. It's a black comedy that keeps softening into something tender, then hardening back into something strange, scored entirely by Cat Stevens. Dry, whimsical, occasionally shocking, and utterly sincere about the case it's making for actually living.

TMDb rating7.6

If you liked this

Rushmore1998

Wes Anderson has cited Harold and Maude directly, and you can feel it: a deadpan, precocious young man, an inappropriate infatuation, and comedy that keeps sneaking up on real feeling.

But Anderson's symmetry and quirk-as-aesthetic can feel mannered if Harold and Maude's looseness is what you actually loved.

Rushmore poster

Little Miss Sunshine2006

A family road trip comedy that keeps death, failure and despair in the same frame as jokes, and somehow lands on something genuinely hopeful about living honestly.

But It's warmer and more crowd-pleasing, an ensemble family film rather than one strange, singular love story.

Little Miss Sunshine poster

Lars and the Real Girl2007

A withdrawn young man, an utterly bizarre premise played completely straight, and a small town that responds with patience instead of mockery — the same trick of using absurdity to sneak up on tenderness.

But Gentler and more sentimental throughout, without the sharp, anarchic edges of Harold's death-obsession or Maude's outlaw streak.

Lars and the Real Girl poster

The wildcard

Something you would not have found on your own.

Ikiru1952

Same engine, flipped: instead of a young man learning to live from an old woman, an old man learns it from watching the vitality of someone young. Both films use the fact of death to make an argument for living, one through deadpan comedy, the other through quiet devastation.

A dying Japanese bureaucrat realizes he has never actually lived and spends his remaining time trying to do one真 thing that matters. Kurosawa's black-and-white masterpiece asks the exact question Harold and Maude asks, and answers it with tears instead of a smirk.

But No jokes to speak of, a slow and formal 1950s pace, and a final act that trades whimsy for something closer to grief.

Ikiru poster

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Recommended by

Up, Please Like Me, Gates of Heaven, Dick Johnson Is Dead, A Man Called Ove, Rushmore, 20th Century Women, All That Heaven Allows, Ghost World, Lars and the Real Girl, The Honeymoon Killers, A Single Man, Wednesday, The Fault in Our Stars, The Loved One, Swiss Army Man, How Stella Got Her Groove Back