Inside Radiohead’s Kid A Mnesia Motion Picture House in Brooklyn: Six Takeaways

Radiohead’s Kid A Mnesia Motion Picture House, which premiered at Coachella last month, has parked its immersive bunker in Brooklyn for a two-month run — a move that lets anyone not wearing a festival wristband take a long look at the band’s most talked-about era.

Radiohead’s Kid A Mnesia exhibit in Brooklyn, N.Y.
Kate Izor

The show opened on a damp evening at the Agger Fish Building in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, a warehouse once tied to the city’s marine trade (there’s none of the fish-market aroma you might expect). That a healthy crowd turned out despite the weather says as much about Radiohead’s cultural persistence as it does about the enduring gravity of Kid A (2000) and Amnesiac (2001).

After that Coachella debut — staged in a specially constructed 17,000-square-foot bunker with 38-foot ceilings built by Goldenvoice beneath the festival grounds — the installation is now accessible without a three-day festival ticket. Multi-week engagements are scheduled through January 2027 in Chicago, Mexico City and San Francisco.

(For those planning a visit to Kid A Mnesia, this article contains minor spoilers about the exhibit and film.)

The exhibit plays the long game

Admission grants you two hours in the compound, and that clock matters. The first half hour is a slow, disorienting wander through halls lined with lyric posters and drawings, banks of stacked vintage televisions, and sculptures of the film’s grotesque inhabitants. An ambient hum undercuts everything; fragments of Kid A’s “Motion Picture Soundtrack” and “Idioteque” drift through the space, and motifs from the galleries pop up later in the movie. It’s the sort of looped recognition that makes you want to point at the screen, which, honestly, invites the “Leonardo DiCaprio pointing at the screen” meme energy.

A different kind of screening room

The viewing chamber rethinks cinema comfort. The floor is lightly padded and climbs up the slanted walls; four broad padded benches form a square at center, and giant screens tilt down toward viewers on all sides. Before the 75-minute film begins, signage encourages visitors to “sit, lay or lean anywhere,” and the room is suited to all three postures. It reads like a cross between the sensory overload of Sphere and the hushed film nooks of contemporary museums.

Surrender to the unease

The movie itself, directed by Sean Evans and built from the visual world of Thom Yorke and long-time collaborator Stanley Donwood, is a hallucinatory stew of the obsessions catalogued in the Kid A Mnesia book: minotaurs, genocide, maps, globalization, monsters, pylons, damns, volcanoes, locusts, lightning, helicopters, Hiroshima, show homes and ring roads. There is a loose narrative — a minotaur’s discovery and journey through an odd, color-soaked realm of inscrutable creatures — but parsing it for literal meaning feels beside the point. The film’s power is its ability to cultivate a steady, unnerving atmosphere.

Nigel Godrich’s studio sleight of hand

Nigel Godrich, credited as producer on the film’s music, does more than lend his name because he engineered the original albums. For the screening he has remixed the material in spatial audio, reshaping familiar tracks — stretching some, truncating others, adding or removing instrumentation — in ways that feel respectful and adventurous at once. It’s a reminder that the threads connecting Radiohead’s studio practice to their visual projects remain taut and inventive.

Deep cuts emerge from the wash

Part of the installation’s pleasure is hearing less-played pieces land with new force. Godrich’s reimagined take turns Kid A’s near-ambient “Treefingers” into a fully immersive wash, while Amnesiac’s sunlit guitars on “Hunting Bears” register as jolts when they arrive late in the film, after an hour of largely electronic textures and at a key narrative moment. And for anyone who ever treated “How To Disappear Completely” as a convenient bathroom break: shame on you.

Twenty-five years later, the work still reads

The material on display largely flows from the 2021 Kid A Mnesia reissue campaign that bundled Kid A, Amnesiac and an extra disc of session material, and the film itself premiered that year as a downloadable title for PS5, PC and Mac. The show’s timing — two decades after those albums first landed, and after a pandemic and new technological upheavals — makes the themes feel less archival and more urgently resonant. Tracks that once sounded like experimental detours now read as prescient meditations on alienation, consumerism and technological creep. The anniversary gives the activation a convenient hook, but the work’s tendency to look outward, not back, is what keeps it relevant.

The installation also leans on companion material: much of the film’s art and the pieces in the adjacent rooms appear in the 2022 Kid A Mnesia: A Book of Radiohead Artwork, reinforcing that this is less a greatest-hits spectacle than a large-scale recontextualization of a specific creative moment in the band’s history. Student discounts are offered on Wednesdays (30% off), a small practical note in an otherwise slightly otherworldly experience.

Seen in Brooklyn’s industrial hush, the Motion Picture House isn’t simply nostalgia turned theatrical. It’s an opportunity to experience how a band that once recalibrated rock music’s emotional register now stages its own myth in physical space — and to listen again, differently, to albums that continue to haunt.