The best films give you something to take away. Not just a moral message, or some sort of transcendental teaching about the world. But a tangible thing you can find meaning in long after the credits have rolled, holding space in the corners of your mind like a cultural souvenir you’ve popped on the shelf.

For me, this usually takes the form of a song or an artist. Sometimes, it’s a place or a quote. Very occasionally, it’s an outfit. Rarely does anything give me all of the above. But Harold and Maude is special, offering a goodie bag of miscellaneous feel-good delights that instantly transport me somewhere joyful.

This may sound far-fetched for a film about a wealthy young man obsessed with suicide. And yet, tonal dichotomy is all part of Harold and Maude’s magic – and the reason why the 1971 film is considered a cult classic. The story begins with Harold staging one of his faux suicides, which his glacial upper-class mother responds to with an eye roll, reminding him that she’s hosting a dinner party at 8pm. “Do try and be a little more vivacious,” she sneers while her depressive son plays dead.

Aside from tormenting his mother with macabre theatrics, Harold lacks any real purpose or place. That is, until he meets Maude, a sprightly septuagenarian with a penchant for stealing cars and crashing funerals. Given his fixation on death, Harold is also a regular at the cemetery, telling his psychiatrist that he attends burials for fun. He first spots Maude sitting on a nearby coffin, eating an orange.

Played by Bud Cort and Ruth Gordon, respectively, Harold and Maude embark on a mission of impish mischief resulting in one of the most spirited – and least conventional – relationship dynamics we’ve ever seen on screen. The pair enjoy a picnic at a demolition site, laughing and sipping from wine glasses while a bulldozer swings into nearby rubbish. They have run-ins with the police after replanting a stolen tree; when an officer asks for ID, Maude responds that she doesn’t believe in driver’s licenses.

But one of my all-time favourite moments comes when the pair are walking through fields of flowers, and Maude asks Harold what kind of flower he’d like to be. He settles on nearby daisies “because they’re all alike”. “Oh, but they’re not,” Maude replies, pointing out their visible differences. “You see, Harold, I feel that much of the world’s sorrow comes from people who are this, yet allow themselves to be treated as that,” she says in reference to a single daisy being seen as part of a homogenised group. Celebrating individuality, she posits, is how we find meaning.

This lovely message aside, the film offers us so much else, from exquisite cinematography – the shot of Harold’s mother swimming leisurely past her son as he lies face down in the water is the perfect aesthetic embodiment of the film’s sardonic tone – to pitch black comedic scenes, like when Harold pretends to set himself on fire to scare off a potential date. Needless to say, it works.

Then there are Maude’s acerbic one-liners (“I’ll never understand this mania for black,” she says of funeral garb), and the often overlooked component of costume: Harold’s flared trousers, double-breasted coats and colourful collars are right out of an Alessandro Michele Gucci campaign.

Of course, there’s also the soundtrack, which was composed by Yusuf / Cat Stevens, who wrote two original songs for the film, including If You Want To Sing Out, Sing Out, which I believe is the closest a song can come to sounding like sunshine. It helps that I heard it live at Glastonbury Festival in 2023, dancing and singing along on a warm Sunday afternoon with my arms wrapped around my best friend.

That’s the thing about feel-good films: part of what preserves them in positivity is the memories you attach to them. One of the reasons I love Harold and Maude so much is that I first watched it in lockdown after a friend selected it for the nightly cinema club he’d started, where we’d all watch the same film from our respective homes and discuss it on WhatsApp afterwards. In the depths of isolation, I found that watching Harold learn to see life through Maude’s rose-tinted glasses made me feel happier and more connected to a group of people than I had in weeks.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s a slightly spicy premise, particularly when the relationship between Harold and Maude becomes sexual: at around 19 years old, he’s 60 years her junior. I’m not sure that would fly today. But somehow, it doesn’t matter. Because this isn’t a story about an age gap relationship or a predatory older woman taking advantage of a younger man. It’s about finding light in the dark and realising that life is worth living, even for the oddballs. In fact, sometimes it’s the oddballs who have the most fun. Perhaps we could all learn something from them.

• Harold and Maude is available on the Criterion Channel in the US and to rent digitally in the UK and Australia