No Exit

Jean-Paul Sartre’s seminal existentialist play No Exit shares a title with a newly-announced project starring Miles Teller and Josh Brolin, but perhaps it shares more? As firefighters heroically rushing into burning homes to rescue those trapped souls, do they not share the same flagrant disregard to the perils of death as the three damned souls trapped in Sartre’s banal Hell? Picture the sooty faces of Teller and Brolin, gleaming with sweat — the look in their eyes is not all that different from the despair visible in Joseph, Inès, and Estelle as they must reckon with their own wrongdoings.