Early Days

In Priyankar Patra’s debut Early Days, we follow a young couple who arrive in the Maximum City carrying ambitions larger than their means and hopes bigger than the city’s cramped apartments. Drawn by the promise of endless possibilities, they soon find themselves absorbed into an ecosystem where visibility becomes currency and selfhood a performance.

Preeti (Manasi Kaushik) and Samrat (Sarthak Sharma) are a young couple who have recently moved to Mumbai and settled into a modest new apartment. Like many contemporary young people, Preeti begins posting snippets of their explorations across the city on social media, and what starts as casual documentation soon plants the idea of becoming an influencer. While Samrat takes up an office job, he also becomes an active participant in her growing online ambitions, helping create content, managing shoots, and supporting her attempts to secure paid collaborations. But as days pass and her digital aspirations intensify, the boundaries between professional ambition and personal intimacy begin to blur, gradually straining her relationship…

Early Days feels distinctly independent, not merely because it confines much of its action to a small apartment, revolves around two central characters, or unfolds within a modest runtime of around 100 minutes. Its independent spirit lies in the intelligence with which it constructs drama from limited means, gradually unfolding the emotional trajectories of its protagonists through events that feel organic to their aspirations and anxieties.
Filmmakers have frequently explored how ambition can fracture personal relationships, and the central conflict here is hardly unprecedented. Yet Patra succeeds in creating a milieu where intimacy, struggle, and resentment acquire a palpable texture. More importantly, he persuades us that Preeti and Samrat deserve our attention in the first place.

The film’s strengths often lie in what it leaves unsaid. Emotions are suggested rather than overstated, and the film displays considerable confidence in silences, unfinished conversations, and inconclusive phone calls in an amicable space where disappointment and distance quietly accumulate. The way the couple navigates the city, discusses family, supports one another, and negotiates everyday compromises carries an understated quality that makes their relationship feel lived-in rather than constructed.

From the film’s opening moments, it becomes evident that while Preeti and Samrat are affectionate and deeply caring towards one another, they are fundamentally built from different temperaments. Soon after moving into their rented apartment, they play a game of Mind Meld, a seemingly playful exercise that quietly reveals their differing priorities. Preeti dreams of moving to Bandra – a more affluent part of Mumbai that symbolises aspiration and upward mobility – while Samrat remains grounded in more immediate concerns. These differences surface repeatedly through small but revealing moments. After filming one of their videos, Preeti wants to buy a rug to make their content look more aesthetically pleasing, but Samrat thinks of purchasing a microwave instead. In these choices lie two competing visions of survival, where one is driven by aspiration and image-building, the other by practicality and financial caution.

As Preeti begins pursuing influence more seriously with brand deals and collaborations, money slowly enters the equation. Thus, Samrat grows increasingly anxious about their spending despite his steady office income, and it sets up the emotional fault lines that will eventually widen between them. Patra’s staging of scenes also subtly reinforces this growing distance. Whenever the couple occupies interior spaces, there remains a sense of intimacy and physical closeness, even during disagreements. It is perhaps fitting, then, that the film’s extended final confrontation unfolds on a busy street, where the open space paradoxically underlines the emotional distance that has gradually emerged between them.

Early Days never becomes critical of influencer culture or treats it as an easy object of ridicule. Preeti is not drawn towards influencing to preserve a carefully curated identity or out of a desperate need for validation. She approaches it as work, a profession with the possibility of financial stability in a city where survival itself is expensive. Yet the film remains attentive to the compromises such labour demands. As influence begins to shape Preeti’s routines and priorities, it gradually begins reshaping her relationship as well. This tension surfaces most clearly in a scene where she asks Samrat for multiple takes of a simple forehead kiss before he leaves for work. Already running late, he still cooperates without complaint, but his expression quietly communicates exhaustion and resignation more effectively than dialogue could.

Similar moments accumulate across the film. A dinner date turns awkward because of an insistence on documenting the moment rather than inhabiting it. In another sequence, despite being vegetarian, Preeti accepts a brand collaboration that requires her to cook and consume eggs on camera. It becomes an act that ends with her vomiting afterwards. Patra does not frame these moments as moral failures. Instead, they reveal the often invisible negotiations between authenticity, financial necessity, and performance. It is through these small acts of compromise rather than dramatic ruptures that the film reveals the emotional cost of turning everyday life into content.

The performances from Manasi Kaushik and Sarthak Sharma carry an easy warmth and genuineness that make Preeti and Samrat feel less like screen characters and more like a couple negotiating the rhythms of their lives. Their chemistry is rooted not in grand romantic gestures but in familiarity, in the casual conversations, shared routines, and moments of quiet support that define long-term intimacy. If Manasi’s Preeti embodies aspiration and sees social media as a possible route towards financial independence and upward mobility, Sarthak’s Samrat brings a groundedness to the relationship, believing that the security of a conventional office job offers greater stability. These contrasting temperaments could easily have been reduced to simplistic binaries, but both actors resist that temptation, allowing their differences to emerge gradually through gestures, silences, and interactions.

Patra, who also serves as the film’s cinematographer, constantly frames his characters in close-ups that emphasise intimacy. The handheld camerawork gives the images an immediacy and keeps the characters anchored within a fixed geographical and emotional space, reinforcing the feeling that both their apartment and the city around them are gradually closing in. Editor Anupam Sinha Roy cuts the film with an unobtrusive fluidity that sustains its naturalistic rhythm while accommodating the grammar of social media. The incorporation of vertical-frame montages and reel aesthetics rarely feels decorative. They are integrated into the film’s visual language in ways that reflect how thoroughly digital life has seeped into our daily existence Sukrit Sen’s sound design further strengthens the film’s realism. By foregrounding diegetic sounds – the hum of appliances, traffic filtering through windows, ambient city noise, and the everyday sounds of domestic life – the film creates a lived-in aural atmosphere.

Early Days is modest in scale, economical in construction, and deeply invested in the emotional rhythms of everyday life. Patra demonstrates an impressive ability to extract dramatic weight from limited spaces, ordinary conversations, and warmth without overstating their significance. The assurance with which he works within these constraints marks him out as a filmmaker worth watching.

Early Days had its world premier at the Red Sea International Film Festival in 2025. It was also screened at the recently held New York Indian Film Festival.

Hindi, Drama, Color