When a broken-hearted accountant finds out her husband, who disappeared, is now a monk in an isolated mountain village, she journeys there to confront him.

I think your suggestions are really good Shareatsman would be a great story if the stakes were as high as the sick child. Only the goal should always be saving the child rather than getting the husband.

If she gets to him mid act 2 there is a whole lot more story to go before the end. So if indeed the child was sick and the transplant (great idea by the way) is necessary when she reaches the husband mid act 2 she has a second mountain to climb; convincing a monk to depart from his monastery... reversal of approach, perhaps she has to understand his new way of life in order to get him away from it.

Trek up the mountain is crossing the threshold great start to act 2. The guide could be so symbolically as well, as the mentor, for he guides her through the tricky path up the mountain then through the tricky path with the husband.

She starts by fighting her own emotions in act 1, then nature and then a culture the levels of conflict escalate from inner, to personal then to extra personal.

She has an inner journey to learn how to relate with others and a clear outer journey goal we can easily visualize, BOOM!
What a great story this could be.

Only stipulate clearly in a logline the logline crucial elements? perhaps:

A desperate mother journeys to a remote Buddhist monastery in search of her estranged husband to convince him to donate his kidney to save their son.

Added the Buddhist part to make it even harder for her to convince him to undergo an operation.

Hope this helps, Nir.

Sorry, patrockable, I didn't read your explanation all the way through, so much of what I said is somewhat meaningless and redundant.

With that background, the stakes are these: if she journeys to find him, and does, and gets rejected again, what has she lost? Nothing, because she didn't have him to begin when she started the journey.

NOW, add the fact that she had his baby while he was gone, and that the baby has a life-threatening condition/disease/illness that can only be cured with a transpplant of some kind from the father, now you have a much higher conflict- life and death- and stakes- death of a loved one.

For the father, he is now forced with a choice of returning to a lifestyle of sin by having to give up his monk quest, returning to a woman he possibly never loved, and a child he never knew he had, or stay, thus almost assuring that the child will die.

For the protag- the wife- she is forced to make this trip for reasons other than her own selfishness, and she probably won't take "no" for an answer. This now becomes a "Sophie's Choice" scenario with a religious twist of sorts.

If you REALLY want to give it a twist, don't have the husband/monk agree to come back and/or save the child. Now what?

Clearly, the above scenarios make the genre and tone quite obvious, so let's hope it's not a romcom!