Barbie is perhaps the most popular toy in the world, known across every corner of the globe. Built with the aim of empowering women, the dolls, however, quickly became the parameters of beauty standards in the world and started having a detrimental effect on the global female psyche. As a result, Mattel tried being inclusive of all body types, complexions, races, and so on in the dolls. But that only went on to make the difference between the “ideal world of empowered women” and the reality more pronounced. And through the film, Gerwig tries exploring exactly that.

In Greta Gerwig’s Barbie, we see the stereotypical Barbie enjoy life as the “It Girl” of Barbieland, until she slowly starts getting self-aware and ponders profound existential queries regarding life and death. Thinking that it’s probably a malfunction, she heads to the real world to fix this and finds out what the “problem” is.