Jeff Baena’s films were small, strange and often very funny: a zombie romance, a medieval comedy about foul-mouthed nuns, a drama about a woman who comes to believe she is being visited by aliens. He made most of them with the same group of actors, and several starred his wife, Aubrey Plaza. Baena was found dead at his home in Los Angeles on January 3, 2025. He was 47. The Los Angeles County medical examiner later ruled that he had died by suicide.
From film school to Huckabees
Baena was born in Miami in 1977 and studied film at New York University. After graduating he moved to Los Angeles and worked as an assistant to the director David O. Russell. Together they wrote I Heart Huckabees, the 2004 “existential comedy” starring Jason Schwartzman, Dustin Hoffman, Lily Tomlin and Mark Wahlberg, about two detectives who investigate the meaning of people’s lives. The film’s chaotic production became notorious, but it gave Baena his first major credit.
His own films
A decade later he began directing his own scripts. Life After Beth, in 2014, starred Plaza as a young woman who comes back from the dead to her grieving boyfriend. Joshy followed in 2016, and The Little Hours, in 2017, put Plaza, Alison Brie and Kate Micucci into a 14th-century convent and let them swear their way through a story from Boccaccio’s Decameron. Horse Girl, which he co-wrote with Brie, premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2020 and was released by Netflix. His last feature, Spin Me Round, came out in 2022.
Aubrey Plaza
Baena and Plaza had been together since 2011 and married in 2021. Plaza spoke about her grief in interviews in the months that followed. As a director Baena returned to the same actors film after film, among them Brie, Micucci, Molly Shannon and John C. Reilly, which gave his movies the feel of a repertory company.
Baena directed five features in eight years, almost all on small budgets, and they now stand as a body of work by a director whose taste was entirely his own. If you are struggling, in the US you can call or text 988 to reach the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline; in the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be reached on 116 123.