For Kendra Monet, “Attached” Turns Anxiety Into a Thriller

 

A still from Kendra Monet's award-winning short film "Attached."

For Kendra Monet, “Attached” 

Turns Anxiety Into a Thriller

At this year’s Brooklyn Film Festival, “Attached” arrives with the shape of a psychological thriller, but its pulse is more intimate. The short film screens Friday, June 5, at 6 p.m. at BRIC Arts Media in Brooklyn, bringing its New York premiere to a city where ambition, pressure and private fear often live side by side.

Directed by Kendra Monet and Demetrius Sadler, “Attached” follows Draya, a struggling actress whose past continues to press against her present. What begins as internal worry grows harder to contain, forcing her to confront her sense of control and the life choices that have brought her to this moment.

For Monet, the film is not about assigning a diagnosis. It is about something more common, and perhaps more unsettling: the anxiety and internalized fears people carry every day, especially when they do not find a healthy way to face them.

Monet is a graduate of New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, where she studied Film and TV. Her work often centers on personal narratives about people who dare to use their voices and imaginations to discover who they are. Her short films have screened at numerous festivals, including “The Walk Home,” a coming-of-age short that earned an honorable mention at the Denton Black Film Festival.

Her documentary, “Pulling the Evidence That Remains,” is currently streaming on Apple TV+, followed by a discussion on mental health with actor John Turturro. Monet also works in publicity at Searchlight Pictures, where she has contributed to major awards campaigns, including Questlove’s Academy Award-winning “Summer of Soul” and Jesse Eisenberg’s Academy Award-nominated “A Real Pain.”

Most recently, “Attached” won the Outstanding Achievement Award for Best Thriller Short at Indie Short Fest.

In a director’s statement, Monet described the film as an exploration of fear left unresolved.

“‘Attached’ explores the burden of unresolved fears that develop into anxiety while navigating everyday life,” Monet said. “The film follows a struggling actress whose inner worries become impossible to ignore, forcing her to confront difficult truths about herself and her circumstances. She presents herself as coping when, in reality, she is carrying the emotional weight internally, and that pressure has accumulated in an unhealthy way, affecting her ability to move forward.”

She added: “‘Attached’ is a reflection on the human experience of carrying emotional burdens, facing uncomfortable truths and finding the strength to confront what has been weighing us down.”

That framing gives the film its emotional center. “Attached” may move like a thriller, but its real subject is not only fear. It is avoidance. It is the cost of pretending to be fine. And it is the moment when what has been buried refuses to stay quiet.

“Attached” screens Friday, June 5, at 6 p.m. at BRIC Arts Media as part of the Brooklyn Film Festival.