A lifeguard struggles to cope with his wife?s suicide, his ethics are tested when he discovers her rapist drowning at the local beach

I hope this comes across as creative criticism – I apologise if it sounds too direct or harsh.

The logline you’ve submitted is not an accurate reflection of what your movie is about. If a producer bought your script on the strength of this logline, and then they read it, they would think – this film is really about a man who tries to help his wife through suicidal depression after she is raped, and it’s FRAMED by an interesting moral dilemma. But it’s certainly not ABOUT that dilemma.

It sounds like, from what you’ve described, the part that your logline describes is going to be the first and last few minutes of the film, and then everything else in between is not what has been described.

The concept is very appealing, and Geno’s comments are right on the money. Wish someone was sending me that kind of constructive criticism! Man, just reading those ideas had me conceiving MY OWN film based on your premise! Don’t worry … it’s not my genre 🙂

What I would say is this – loglines that begin with “Someone struggles with something, then this happens” never hit home with me, because it fragments the idea into two separate concepts. The “internal” dilemma (someone struggling with x) and the “external” dilemma (then something else happens). As writers, we want the internal and external to be intwined inextricably throughout the course of the story, right? So why is it that the first thing we’re using to tell people about our story sets it up as being two separate elements?

What if your logline began “After his wife’s suicide, a lifeguard witnesses his wife’s rapist drowning … (then whatever else happens in the story).

Unless this is a short, I can’t imagine your WHOLE movie centres around whether he’s going to rescue this guy or not … unless the whole film take place in flashbacks during the two or three minutes it takes for this guy to die? Whilst this might be a very difficult decision for your character, it’s probably not actually what the film is about (again, as Geno suggests, unless it’s a short film). Your protag either does or does not rescue the guy, and then the film is actually about what happens next …