In real life, people can wander for years, decades, their whole lives with any number of objective goals ?or none at all — a plotless life.

But in reel life– movies — the main character is supposed to have an overarching objective goal. ?In other words: ?the character needs a plot. ?There may be any number of subordinate goals on the way to achieving the overarching goal, but there needs to be one overarching goal, a unity of action.

And that overarching goal unifying the action needs to be identified in the logline.

Take the justly acclaimed movie “Son of Saul” (2015), set in the Auschwitz death camp in October, 1944. The main character is a Sondercommando, a Jewish prisoner, who in exchange for being allowed to live for a few more months, herds his fellow Jews into the gas chambers. That’s the the setup, the initial situation.

And then he discovers the body of his illegitimate son in a heap of freshly gassed corpses (Inciting ?Incident). ?He resolves to bury him rather than have his body burn in the ovens. ?(Objective Goal). ? The plot is set in motion.

Numerous harrowing and horrendous life-and-death events follow and all of them are tied together –unity of action– by the prisoner’s ?objective goal, ?his desperate desire to have his son’s body buried rather than burned. ?Here’s my take on a logline:

When a Jewish forced laborer, who survives by cremating other Jews in Auschwitz, discovers the body of his son, he struggles to have him buried rather than burned.
(28 words)

The unifying action is specific, unambiguous . And the logline ?also performs another function. ?It implicitly raises a dramatic question that the movie will eventually answer. ?In the case of “Son of Saul” the dramatic question is: ?will the Sondercommando succeed in burying his son?

What dramatic question does your logline raise that the rest of the story will eventually answer?