Jeff Baena, Film Director Who Was Married to Aubrey Plaza, Dies at 47

Jeff Baena, the director and screenwriter who co-wrote the dark comedy “I Heart Huckabees,” and who directed films including “Life After Beth” and “Horse Girl,” died on Friday. He was 47.

His death was confirmed by a press representative, who did not cite a cause.

Mr. Baena often elevated dark thematic elements with humor in his works. There were zombies and romance in “Life After Beth” (2014), and improper nuns in “The Little Hours” (2017).

He was married to the actress Aubrey Plaza, who played the titular character in “Life After Beth,” about a woman who comes back from the dead after a fatal snake bite, and acted in “The Little Hours,” and “Spin Me Round” (2022), which Mr. Baena directed and co-wrote with the actress Alison Brie.

Mr. Baena also co-wrote the 2004 film “I Heart Huckabees,” a dark comedy that stars Dustin Hoffman, Jude Law, Jason Schwartzman, Lily Tomlin and Mark Wahlberg. The film, about an environmentalist who hires “existential detectives,” was not a box office success but developed a cult following for its quirky plotlines and characters.

“My parents were divorced, so I’m sure the trauma of divorce helped inform my sense of humor,” Mr. Baena said in an interview on Fresh Fiction, a YouTube channel, in 2022. “Most comedy probably comes from drama.”

He decided to become a filmmaker at 11 years old, he told Fresh Fiction, when he was flipping through cable television channels and tuned into Stanley Kubrick’s “A Clockwork Orange.” He was so intrigued by the film that he asked his father to take him to a video rental store, where they rented the 1963 Federico Fellini film “8 ½.”

“I was always drawn to weirdo movies,” he said on Fresh Fiction. He said he was exposed “to a lot of stuff that I think was a little bit left of center, and so that was normalized for me,” adding, “I sought it out.”

Jeffrey Baena was born on June 29, 1977, and grew up in Miami. He graduated from New York University in 1999, where he majored in film and minored in Medieval and Renaissance Studies, according to The New Yorker.

He later co-wrote “I Heart Huckabees” with the director David O. Russell. The film “captures liberal-left despair with astonishingly good humor,” the critic Manohla Dargis wrote in her 2004 review of the movie for The New York Times.

Ms. Dargis added that it is a “comedy of dialectics, in which opposing dualities slug it out like wounded lovers, but it’s nothing if not deeply sincere.”

A complete list of Mr. Baena’s survivors was not immediately available. His wife, Ms. Plaza, became well known for her role as April Ludgate on the television series “Parks and Recreation,” in which she played a moody, sardonic and reluctant officer worker. She has recently starred in films including “Megalopolis” (2024) and “Emily the Criminal” (2022).

In addition to directing and writing “Life After Beth” and “The Little Hours,” Mr. Baena wrote and directed the films “Joshy” (2016), and “Horse Girl” (2020), which he co-wrote with Ms. Brie.

Jack Begg contributed research.