The Chips Are Down

The play-novel “No Exit” (Actually “There’s No More Waiting”) was written by Sartre back in 1943, but published only after the war ended, in 1947.

In a long line outside an office where posthumous fates are decided in the afterlife, two people collide: a beautiful woman poisoned by her husband for inheritance, and a young revolutionary shot by a betrayer. They meet, start talking to escape the boredom of waiting, and… they manage to love each other so intensely that, unexpectedly, they receive a second chance to return to the world of the living—because an error has slipped into the paperwork of “heavenly bureaucracy.” These two, destined for each other, never met in life.

But there is a condition: within just one day, the lovers must find each other on Earth—otherwise they will return to the afterlife forever…