Just as it takes a tough man to make a tender chicken, it takes a smart filmmaker to make a stupid movie, which I mean in the best possible way. Science-fiction films, once a cinematic counterpart to pulp fiction, are today often big-budget, overproduced spectacles that substitute grandiosity for imagination. M. Night Shyamalan's new film, "Old" (which opens in theatres on Friday), is different. His frequent artistic pitfall is complication--the burdening of stories with extravagant yet undeveloped byways in order to endow them with ostensible significance and to stoke exaggerated effects. With "Old," facing the constraints of filming during the pandemic--on a project that he'd nonetheless planned before it--Shyamalan has created a splendid throwback of a science-fiction thriller that develops a simple idea with stark vigor and conveys the straight-faced glee of realizing the straightforward logic of its enticing absurdity.

Unlikely as it might seem at this point in his up-and-down career, M. Night Shyamalan proves he can still pull off a genuine surprise at the end of his unnervingly clever new thriller, "Split." The precise nature of that twist will not be revealed here, though given its mind-tickling narrative implications -- to say nothing of the wildfire-like speed of social media these days -- you can probably expect the statute of limitations on spoilers to run out faster than it did on "Bruce Willis is dead" or "Rosebud is a sled." Nevertheless, the more significant and spoiler-proof astonishment here is that Shyamalan -- after nearly a decade-long creative (and sometimes commercial) drought -- has reclaimed much of the formal precision and conceptual daring that made his earlier pictures, "The Sixth Sense" and "Unbreakable" chief among them, so memorably creepy. There is life after "After Earth." To be fair, there were already promising signs of career resurgence in the writer-director's more recent output, including his 2013 found-footage thriller, "The Visit," and the first season of the science-fiction series "Wayward Pines."