Carlson Young’s second feature sends an intern from the New York art world to London in a seat she never paid for, lets a stranger mistake her for the boss, and dresses the oldest fairytale in the business up as an art sale. The open question is how long a lie that small can carry a whole film.

Ana Santos is an intern at a New York auction house, close enough to great paintings to know their prices and far enough from power that nobody learns her name. She lives in the apartment of her sister Vivian, whose fiancé Ronnie keeps telling her it is time to move out. Then she spots a typo during an auction, warns her boss before it becomes an expensive mistake, and earns a place on a work trip to London as an assistant’s assistant. Upgraded, the romantic comedy directed by Carlson Young with Camila Mendes as Ana, starts from that small promotion and then hands her a much larger one by accident.

The accident happens at the airport. The boss is Claire, and her two senior assistants, Suzette and Renee, have been trying to sabotage the new arrival. A check-in agent who sees how they treat Ana moves her to first class. Before boarding, Ana spills a drink on William, young, British and wealthy, played by Archie Renaux, and without quite meaning to she lets him believe she is the art director of her company’s New York office. William does what men of his position do in these stories: he introduces her to his mother, Catherine, a celebrity in Britain whose private art collection is exactly the kind of property Ana’s employer exists to sell.

From there the script by Christine Lenig, Justin Matthews and Luke Roberts runs on escalation. Ana goes to Catherine’s house to recover a laptop she left in the car and walks into a party, where she meets a famous painter and keeps the director story alive. She uses William’s family connections to get Claire last-minute tickets to a performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, a favour that lands while Claire is competing with Gerard, the head of the Paris office, for the same position. She wears a designer dress taken from Claire without asking. And at the end of a long night she has William drop her at Claire’s hotel instead of her own, because hers is the hotel an assistant’s assistant gets.

Upgraded - Prime Video — Upgraded – Prime Video

Cinderella with an auction catalogue

The film presents itself as a modern retelling of Cinderella, and the pieces map without effort. The stepsisters are two senior assistants, the ball is a London party, the fairy godmother is an airline employee with a conscience, and the glass slipper has become a boarding pass for a seat Ana never paid for. What Upgraded adds to that frame is the setting. The art market, with its auctions, consignments and private collections, gives the lie a price tag: the man Ana is falling for is also the son of a client her employer badly wants, which turns every date into a possible conflict of interest.

The structure has older relatives too. Audrey Hepburn‘s Roman Holiday built its romance on a princess passing as an ordinary woman for a day in Rome. Upgraded runs the trick in the other direction, with an ordinary woman passing as someone important for a few weeks in London. The workplace half belongs to the newer tradition of the young woman learning the trade from a feared female boss in a glamorous industry, a formula that has fed comedies for two decades because it lets the career plot and the love plot collide on the same calendar.

A director coming from the dark side

Carlson Young came to directing from acting. She played Brooke Maddox in the first two seasons of MTV’s Scream and later turned her own short film, The Blazing World, into her first feature, a dark fantasy that premiered at the Sundance Film Festival. Upgraded is her second feature and a sharp change of register, from a psychological fable to a bright studio comedy with a fairytale skeleton. It is an American production shot in the United Kingdom, and Prime Video released it on February 9, 2024, five days before Valentine’s Day.

Camila Mendes spent seven seasons as Veronica Lodge in Riverdale and led the Netflix comedy Do Revenge; Upgraded gives her a straight romantic lead in which the whole plot depends on the audience forgiving her character’s lie. Archie Renaux is best known as Malyen Oretsev in the Netflix fantasy series Shadow and Bone, and here he gets the role the genre has always reserved for the heir: the man whose money is the obstacle and whose trust is the prize.

The supporting cast carries more weight than the leads’ résumés. Marisa Tomei, who won an Oscar for My Cousin Vinny and has played Aunt May in the recent Spider-Man films, is Claire, the boss whose approval Ana wants and whose clothes she borrows. Lena Olin, Oscar-nominated for Enemies, A Love Story, plays Catherine, William’s mother and the collector at the centre of the deal. Thomas Kretschmann, remembered for The Pianist, and Grégory Montel, from the French series Call My Agent!, complete a cast that leans on European faces to sell its London.

Music, money and the February slot

The score is by Isom Innis of Foster the People, with several tracks contributed by Rudy Mancuso, and the soundtrack album came out in April 2024. Commercially, the film belongs to a slot Amazon has been filling deliberately: mid-budget romantic comedies released straight to streaming, aimed at a weekend audience rather than a box office. The same year Prime Video also launched The Idea of You and Space Cadet, which places Upgraded inside a catalogue strategy more than a standalone bet.

Spoilers follow for the last act. A story built on a lie has to decide what the lie costs, and Upgraded collects the bill in one afternoon: Catherine pulls her collection from the upcoming sale, William arrives unannounced at Ana’s office, suspects she used him to land his mother’s business and breaks up with her, and Claire discovers the deception and fires her. The way back runs through a confession to Catherine, who turns out to be playing her own game with the auction, and through a sale that Ana is finally allowed to run under her real title.

Upgraded does not pretend to reinvent anything, and its ambition sits in the details of the swap: an auction house where the palace used to be, an intern’s job title where the rags used to be. Whether that is enough depends on what a viewer wants from a February romantic comedy, a surprise or the comfort of knowing exactly where the boarding pass leads.

Tags: comedies, romance, Prime Video, Archie Renaux, Marisa Tomei