The influencer industrial complex has swallowed us all and we are currently living inside its belly. It has infiltrated every layer of modern life, shaping social dynamics, personal aspirations, and even economies. Today, a child is born and their parents create a page for them. Teachers film classroom interactions. Universities, academics, and professionals now build legitimacy through short-form videos. Every career path comes with a parallel expectation to cultivate an online presence. We choose food based on viral recommendations. Our clothes, home aesthetics, relationships, weddings, birthdays, even casual meet-ups all carry the imprint of online trends with some degree of performance. Every pocket of society you can imagine has been pulled into this spectacle. And because this pervasive shift has happened so quickly, we have barely paused to ask if we're even equipped to live like this.

Priyankar Patra’s debut feature 'Early Days' dissects this culture through an intimate story around it. Selected for the Red Sea International Film Festival’s New Visions Competition, the film follows Preeti and Samrat, a young couple, as they begin a new life together. Their playful habit of posting their adventures around the city on social media soon takes on a momentum of its own, pushing them into the world of content creation. The film captures how this couple, with big dreams and very real socio-economic anxieties, slides into the world of influencing and quickly becomes fluent in its language of trends, viral audio, transitions, and aesthetic templates.

Preeti jumps into the deep end as an influencer, driven by its potential and the promise of upward mobility, while Samrat keeps trying to find his balance in these new waters. Through them, the film lays out the two sides of this world. On one, content creation has been a democratic gateway that has allowed people from small towns, and even villages to find visibility, income, and a way around barriers like formal education that usually keep opportunities out of reach. On the other, the pressure to mould yourself into a version that can go viral comes at the cost of constant self-adjustment leaving many creators stretched thin and mentally frayed. The film holds this contrast clearly, using the couple’s different instincts to show how empowering and corrosive this medium can become at the same time.

As Preeti and Samrat's following grows, the couple becomes a brand. We see them recording their life — at the house, around the city, inside their private moments. They attune themselves to the 'aesthetic' lifestyle of a creator and soon the line between real and reel begins to blur. Preeti pushes for engagement and scaling up; Samrat longs for real intimacy, and their relationship begins to crack under this weight. Eventually, the demands of staying relevant even pushes them into doing things against their principles. Through this descent, the film portrays, how dark the act of denying your own identity and crossing boundaries to go viral can get; and the implications of doing it for the 'gram.

Priyankar also draws a fascinating parallel between influencer culture and the informal economy — one that mirrors every other unstable hustle the underprivileged have taken on for decades to survive in cities like Mumbai. In those economies, uncertainty, irregular income, and the absence of safety nets are a given, but they often remain invisible to people who don’t live inside that class reality. By placing that same instability in the influencer world — a space usually associated with aspiration, creativity, and lifestyle aesthetics — the film makes the precarity impossible to ignore. It also captures the clash between seeing influencing as a legitimate job and the widespread belief that it is unserious. This paradox is familiar to anyone outside the security of a white-collar job, but here that struggle and the perception of it seeps across class lines.

Between the tug of war that is Preeti and Samrat's conflict, is a tender love and a genuinely sweet relationship that is put through the wringer. The film captures how even two people who deeply care for each other can drift apart when their priorities pull them in different directions. And when the internet is added to that mix, it becomes both heartbreaking and dystopian.

As any original film that manages to move us, 'Early Days' builds its own language to tell its story. The filmmaker stitches together everyday vignettes from the couple’s life with captions, hashtags, branded templates, vertical frames, and lives we live on our screens. The film’s formal choices — sharp montage, associative edits, and a hybrid visual grammar make this entanglement we have with the internet starkly apparent. By mapping the emotional, spiritual, and ethical terrain of people living in a hyperdigital age, the film critiques, without mocking, the world it’s examining. By refusing to treat influencer culture as simply 'silly', it makes space to unveil how insidious its pull actually is — how it has reorganised not only how we work, but how we think, love, and see ourselves. Through the grief of a declining relationship, it presents a larger question about values: what we are trading away in exchange for entertainment and relevance, and whether we even notice the cost anymore.

Follow Priyankar Patra here and watch the teaser for the film below:

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