One of the few actor/director couples in the US independent film scene, Aubrey Plaza and Jeff Baena were never keen to discuss their personal lives in detail, but their relationship informed the four enjoyably twisted movies they made together, beginning with the zombie comedy Life After Beth (2014).
Baena, who has taken his own life aged 47, was a shrewd and witty writer-director, while Plaza brought her witheringly sarcastic, cooler-than-thou persona, as well as jaded line readings and a heavy-lidded comic ennui, to the roles he wrote for her. Their films had an emotional depth beneath the deceptively arch or flippant surface.
In Life After Beth, Plaza plays a young woman who dies from a snake bite while hiking, then simply climbs out of her grave some weeks later and strolls back to her parents’ house. Relieved to see their daughter again, they hide her from view, while also trying tactfully not to alert her to the fact that she is now a zombie. One of many in the town, in fact.
The film has beyond-the-gallows humour in abundance – a running joke reveals that raging, carnivorous zombies can only be placated by the sound of smooth jazz – but also an undercurrent of warmth and melancholy. There is tenderness in Beth’s relationship with her parents (John C Reilly and Molly Shannon) and her boyfriend (Dane DeHaan), who are grateful to have her back in their lives, even if she is undead.
Baena and Plaza’s next collaboration was Joshy (2016), about a bachelor party that goes ahead despite the prospective bride having killed herself. The film featured some of Baena’s director friends, including Alex Ross Perry, Joe Swanberg and Paul Weitz. It was also his first movie with Alison Brie, who appeared in four of his films including Horse Girl (2020), his only picture without Plaza. That unnerving psychological drama was co-written with Brie and inspired by her grandmother’s experiences with paranoid schizophrenia.
The Little Hours (2017), a bawdy comedy loosely based on The Decameron, had its origins in Baena’s college days, when he had majored in film and minored in medieval renaissance studies, covering topics including Sexual Transgression in the Renaissance and Middle Ages. He described the picture, shot on location in Tuscany, as a “medieval combat nun movie”.
“I tried my best to achieve the spirit of the original story,” he told the Seattle Gay News. “The Decameron is amazingly funny, even though it’s almost 700 years old. I wanted to honour its sense of humour and its silliness.” Much of the film’s comic sparkle comes from the mismatch between the 14th-century period detail and the 21st-century vernacular.
By now, Baena had assembled his own repertory company of actors including not just Plaza and Brie but also Shannon, Reilly, Paul Reiser and Fred Armisen. He returned to Italy for the whirlwind black comedy Spin Me Round (2022), which he again co-wrote with Brie, who was also its lead actor. Plaza co-starred as a wickedly seductive PA overseeing a corporate training programme in Italy. To the accompaniment of lush, swooning strings by Pino Donaggio, who composed the scores for dozens of horrors and slasher thrillers, the working holiday descends into decadence, carnality and violence. The New York Times called Spin Me Round “ludicrous in its large strokes and pointed in its details”.
Though each of Baena’s films contained some unforeseen emotional kick, the subjects and styles were strikingly dissimilar, a fact on which he prided himself. “What’s the point of doing it if it’s been done before?” he said.
His taste for the absurd and eclectic had already been signalled by I ♥ Huckabees (2004), which he co-wrote with the film’s director, David O Russell. A bizarre and borderline incomprehensible comedy about a husband-and-wife team of “existential detectives”, played by Dustin Hoffman and Lily Tomlin, the picture was greeted with confusion on its release. It has endured as a nutty cult favourite, even if what is on screen was often in danger of being overshadowed by the off-screen discord, including a leaked video of Russell viciously berating Tomlin between takes.
Baena was born in Miami, Florida, to Scott, a lawyer, and his wife, Barbara. He became obsessed with film after seeing A Clockwork Orange and 8½ at the age of 11. He was educated at Killian high school in Kendall, Florida, and graduated from NYU Tisch School of the Arts in 1999.
His first industry job was as a production assistant to the director Robert Zemeckis. He then became an assistant editor to Russell. He later did uncredited script revisions on films including the Robert De Niro/Ben Stiller comedy sequel Meet the Fockers (2004).
Baena and Plaza met in 2011 over a round of the board game Balderdash, and married 10 years later in their garden during the Covid-19 lockdown by hiring an officiant from the website 1hourmarriage.com. “We got a little bored one night,” Plaza joked to the chatshow host Ellen DeGeneres. Bride and groom wore tie-dyed pyjamas.
Also during lockdown, they collaborated on the “found footage” television series Cinema Toast (2021), created by Baena, which stitched together vintage film clips with irreverent new dialogue dubbed over the top.
“It’s an amazing experience to work with your partner in this way,” Plaza said. “I’ve worked with Jeff since his first movie. I’ve seen him evolve and I’ve seen him grow. It’s a really special dynamic that we have.”
Baena is survived by Plaza and his parents.
• Jeffrey Lance Baena, film director and screenwriter, born 29 June 1977; died 3 January 2025
