Watch Iowa For Free

Simply A Masterpiece

Expected more

Am i the only one who thinks........Average?

There are women in the film, but none has anything you could call a personality.

I'd really like to be able to tell you that this movie is worth seeing, that this little indy flick about small town Iowa life and the perils of methamphetamine is gripping and smart and honest. But this film isn't gripping. It isn't smart. It isn't honest. It is steaming pile of confused and confusing storytelling mixed together with a relentless kaleidoscope of visual stylizing. From inexplicable accents and morphing beards to nonsensical schemes and magical lacerations to ridiculously excessive editing and a character that looks and acts like he just stepped out of The Time Tunnel, Iowa is just one stupid and irritating thing after another.While it's ostensibly about a pair of young lovers named Esper Harte and Donna Huffman (Matt Farnsworth and Diane Foster) descending into a meth-fueled haze of violence and hallucinations, there are too many elements of this tale that don't make sense on the most rudimentary level for it to be about anything except how much it sucks. I mean, it's clear that writer/director Matt Farnsworth wants to say something about the meth problem in Iowa. It's also clear that he believes he can say it by ineptly aping the style of Requiem for a Dream. What's absolutely unmistakable, however, is that Farnsworth is incapable of telling any story more complicated than "see Spot run".Let me just give you one example of the head-scratchingly incompetent writing at work here. Early on in the movie, Esper gets thrown in jail on a drug charge by corrupt corrections officer Larry (Michael T. Weiss) as part of a plan to kill him and get the money left to Esper by his dead father. All we see of Esper in jail is him slumped up against the wall in a prison cell with someone leering at him. Larry then asks Donna to come down to his office, whereupon he spends several hours raping her over and over. He lets Donna go. She gets some money and bails out her boyfriend…and that somehow foils Larry's attempt to kill Esper. There's never a hint of how or when Esper was supposed to get murdered. There's not a glimmer of an explanation for why Larry decided to spend an evening raping Donna or how he thought he could get away with it. Nothing in the entire sequence of events makes a lick of sense.And it's not just big stuff like that which is screwed up in this movie. It's also little things like Esper's beard constantly changing shape and length. It randomly ranges from relatively trimmed to nearly Amish-like in dimension. Esper gets a cut on his forehead. Then the cut disappears. Then it reappears. And that's not because the story jumps around in some non-linear fashion. They simply forgot the cut makeup one day while they were shooting a scene. And then there are these weirdly southern accents that creep into the dialog at times. Unlike people from Minnesota or Wisconsin, Iowans are renowned for having a dialect without inflection. But this film seems to believe that all white trash are descended from the same tribe somewhere in Kentucky.By far the strangest aspect of Iowa is the character of Larry. It's not that he's cartoonishly evil. It's that while the film is clearly set in the early to mid 2000s, Larry looks like he wakes up every morning in 1973. His clothes, his manner and his facial hair are all from a completely different era than every other person in the story. Michael T. Weiss appears to be having some fun playing this walking, talking anachronism, but that doesn't change how awesomely misplaced the character is in this movie.As someone born and bred in the Hawkeye State, it pains me to say that Iowa is one of those films where all you can do is sit and marvel at how awful it is.

Tasteless. I can't even write intelligently about the movie. I laughed the entire movie. It wasn't supposed to be funny. Matt Farnsworth has no clue what he is doing. His story is written, it seems, without any knowledge of Iowa culture and the meth problem. I know Farnsworth is from Iowa, which makes his movie even more puzzling to me. Why do the two main characters have accents? It doesn't make any sense. The acting was mediocre at best and at times hard to watch. Gratituous violence and sex filled the movie. I am guessing that the violence and sex were supposed to make the movie edgy, but it came across as unbelievable and offensive. The ending of the movie is so brilliantly bad that all I could do was laugh and look at the rolling credits with disbelief. As I walked out of the theatre everyone else who was leaving was laughing along with me. The ending of the movie was meant to evoke tears, but it did the exact opposite. Do not waste your time on this horrible movie, unless you want to see ignorant, sappy, overacted, clichéd drivel.

I just saw this film at the Tribeca film festival and it had some great moments. It is reminiscent of Pulp Fiction, Blow, and Natural Born Killers, except it only takes place in a small town. Farnsworth did a brilliant job, especially considering it is his directorial debut and how young he is. There are some very gory scenes and it is definitely suspenseful. The camera work is very good. The beginning is a little slow, but most of the film is powerful. I have no complaints except that maybe there was a lot of stuff that was done for shock value. I am sure this film will get him some attention and more work. I recommend this to people who like films with drug and violent themes. There are some messages in it, but this is not a highly intellectual film. I don't normally write reviews, so I hope this is helpful.-J

As a New York City based editor and onceuponatime native of SE Iowa (about 15 miles from where this film was shot) I knew I had to see this film. I had not heard of it but was very pleasantly surprised.Farnsworth pulled off the trifecta here of writing, directing, and acting and he did a pretty good job at all three. He's obviously a competent filmmaker. The cast did a pretty good job - I was a little disappointed to hear a "southern" accent too often. The main female lead really grew on me. At first I thought she was a little too Hollywood and too good looking but I really bought into her character. The editing was done well. At times it was a little too "showy" when simple cuts could have told the story better. But the story kept moving forward and there were never any of those slow moments when you wish you could hit fast forward.I expected a little more juxtaposition showing idyllic rural Iowa life and the effect that the meth problem has had on a lot of small Midwestern towns. Meth is a big big problem and it affects a lot of people who have nothing to do with meth. This movie mainly focuses on a small group of characters who deal meth, take meth, or are related to meth users.All in all, it was very well done. Kind of reminded me of Badlands. Maybe we could call this "Badlands One State Over" since Badlands was in Nebraska. It's definitely got some over-the-top violence but done well in the context of the film.Farnsworth should be proud of himself. He did a great job here managing all 3 duties. The writing was tight, he plays the role real well, and he had some very interesting directing choices. I definitely recommend Iowa.