Early Days screened at New York Indian Film Festival 2026.
Directed by Priyankar Patra, the modest drama circles a couple who have just moved to Mumbai.
Tailoring themselves for online visibility and engagement begins to eat into the marrow of their relationship.
Priyankar Patra’s debut, Early Days, opens with an eager, hopeful spirit. A young couple, Preeti (Manasi Kaushik) and Samrat (Sarthak Sharma), have just moved to Mumbai. She’s already suggesting the next place they could move to. She wants to bound ahead, staying no more than six months, amusing him. Both have corporate jobs. However, when Samrat proposes putting online snippets from their lives, it lodges deep in her.
Screened recently at the New York Indian Film Festival 2026, Early Days sheds the blinkers around what it takes to build and sustain as digital influencers at a time when everything seems to be on edge. Inflation and job precarity have meshed into this all-encroaching threat, placing all on a fragile thread that can snap any time. Intrinsic to this plush world is the sense of an illusion, that comfort is on borrowed time. The endowments that Preeti feels are sweeping in might just as well erode tomorrow. Instability is a part of the deal. Preeti almost shuts herself from these vagaries but Samrat is cautious and not as enthused. She plans big, chalks out strategies, micro-manages aesthetics. At an early moment in the film, the camera sharply registers Samrat’s near-flinch, his disorientation at Preeti’s efforts to do up the room. She arranges the flower pots, the paintings, fixes the curtains. She takes to honing this concurrent online version more diligently than he had thought. While he had originally advocated for posting only when they wish to, she lets it take over their lives. The boundaries get muddled.
Neither Preeti nor Samrat comes from privilege. They are from small towns, trying to earn a foothold in a big city. Shorn of supportive parents, she talks about disappointing them since she didn’t follow their dreams. She’s wistfully stunned for he and his father care to ask one another on a daily basis if they have had their dinner. She doesn’t have such an emotional, steady connection with her family. A deeply nuanced, delicate study of a relationship in churn, torn between projection and survival, Early Days casts a sobering pull. Patra hews performative love and care for online scrutiny into the texture of a private space. The tension between pitching a carefully customised avatar for brands and just being themselves animates a growing discord between the couple. Samrat gripes about puffing up their lifestyles. Patra’s subtle, sensitive writing hints at fractures over priorities preceding the influencer rows. Charting the monthly expenses, he wonders if they should buy a microwave, whereas she recommends a rug. He’s bewildered but doesn’t protest.
Preeti keeps eyeing the barometer of visibility and success as embodied by an old friend, Sonam. There’s more than a dash of envy and competitiveness. Samrat is perplexed at how seriously Preeti snowballs what he suggested as an indulgence into a far bigger urgency. A bid to rigorously share their lives online, mounting and designing endearing moments for virality, invades every aspect of the relationship, their identities. A particularly bristling scene emerges as Preeti choreographs a casual gesture of intimacy, an expression of love. A simple peck is redone again and again to strike a certain pose. His restlessness and exasperation escalate, even as she buries herself in tailoring colours, combinations, an aesthetic appearance for maximum online attention. In another cutting scene, a dinner date turns sour in a rush to capture for social media than purely inhabiting a nice, quiet moment.
Patra mines an immediacy in the constant hustle Preeti gets caught in. She’s as blindsided by the allure, the teased snazzy and speedy mobility as wary he is. The two seem to be on entirely disparate wavelengths and expectations right from the go. Samrat sees the influencing as a little side hustle, extra pay, but never as a possible substitute for their jobs. Chafing begins when Preeti believes it to be replaceable, pouring herself wholly into the engagement game. She becomes driven to prop up a tastefully curated online avatar for themselves, vaunting a couple to fawn over. Shot mostly indoors, Early Days nevertheless threads in a desire for traversing the wider world.
Patra isn’t interested in skewering Preeti’s flinging aspirations. He adopts a more compassionate and curious gaze, sighing at the inflections splintering her anticipation. If Preeti wants to throw themselves together fully into content creation, he pulls back. He’s hyper-aware of how tenuous it can all be. He resists when she floats the prospect of quitting their jobs and committing solely to scaling up their online profile. What if the brand collaborations dry up one day? He pokes. But she’s too enamoured by swanky possibilities. She isn’t ready to reckon with the shifting tides inherent in this hustle. She swats away those concerns, faithful that their engagement will weather through thick and thin. However, the fleeting nature of the trade ultimately weighs heavy. The couple turn strangers to each other. Truths are hidden. As Preeti races ahead, upping the ante of their lifestyles, emotional distance slowly but surely spreads between her and Samrat. Patra never judges his characters but acknowledges the push-pull between curated expectation, financial viability and the crunch of trying to ascend without safety nets.
Patra frames the couple in tight close-ups, as disaffection, difference and chasms widen. Kaushik and Sharma bring lived-in ease as well as the unravelling. Early Days isn’t big on ambition and scope. Instead, it’s contained, confident and precise. It’s modest but knows its way around its terrain. Patra is tapping the contours of alienation within a couple, anxieties and apprehensions of individuals forging dreams in a rocky world. Do we have to broadcast our entire lives? Samrat demands, more than flustered. He’s nervous about the ground beneath their feet dislodging. Early Days is most acute in grasping these quick, brutal swings, between the headrush of spiked traction and days when everything dribbles down to stagnation. With fluency and canny attention, Priyankar Patra has seized on what these fluctuations can do to a familiar equation, the glory of class mobility and the sudden trough.
