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

After a Coachella debut, Radiohead’s Kid A Mnesia Motion Picture House has opened in Brooklyn, giving New York audiences a two-month window to wander through the band’s most unnerving era. The immersive installation, which opened its New York run on Wednesday (see byline 5/7/2026), follows a bespoke Coachella installation and will continue with multi-week runs in Chicago, Mexico City and San Francisco through January 2027.

The exhibit’s New York home is the Agger Fish Building in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, a hulking warehouse that once served the neighborhood’s marine trade — minus the salt-and-sea smell. Still, the industrial setting is perfect: a dreary evening, a cavernous space, and a crowd that turned out despite the weather and the location. That turnout speaks less to spectacle than to a persistent fact: nearly a quarter-century after Kid A and Amnesiac landed, the records still compel people to physically show up.

From Coachella bunker to city-wide pilgrimage

Kid A Mnesia first surfaced at Coachella, tucked into a Goldenvoice-built, 17,000-square-foot bunker with 38-foot ceilings constructed under the festival grounds. The festival’s big-name headliners — Sabrina Carpenter, Justin Bieber and Karol G — arguably dominated headlines that week, but this installation offered a different kind of gravity: a chance to enter a world built around Radiohead’s 2000 and 2001 records without buying a three-day pass. With extended runs scheduled across the U.S. and Mexico, fans who missed the festival now have room to breathe, linger and lose themselves in the details.

The show isn’t a greatest-hits spectacle

Most of the material on display isn’t brand new. The installation leans heavily on the 2021 Kid A Mnesia reissue campaign, which packaged the 2000 Kid A and 2001 Amnesiac albums with an extra disc of session material. The centerpiece remains the 75-minute film that premiered in 2021 as a download for PS5, PC and Mac, directed by Sean Evans and populated with the visual world conjured by Thom Yorke and Stanley Donwood. Much of the artwork also appears in the 2022 book Kid A Mnesia: A Book of Radiohead Artwork, but seen at human scale and in motion, those images take on new menace.

How the physical exhibit plays the long game

Visitors get two hours in the compound. The first half hour is open time to roam: postered lyrics and scratchy drawings line the halls, stacks of vintage televisions flicker, and statues that nod to the film’s characters loom in dim alcoves. Album motifs recur in the rooms and then reappear in the movie, so attentive viewers often find themselves doing the museum equivalent of that “Leonardo DiCaprio pointing at the screen” meme — excited to spot how the installation’s props dovetail with the film’s imagery. An ambient hum runs through everything, with faint threads of Kid A’s “Motion Picture Soundtrack” and “Idioteque” sewing the rooms together.

A novel way to watch

The screening space resists the usual darkened auditorium template. The floor is lightly padded and climbs a few feet up slightly slanted walls; four large padded benches form a square at the center. Giant screens inhabit each of the four walls, tilted toward the audience, and pre-show text encourages visitors to “sit, lay or lean anywhere.” It’s part art-house experiment, part communal mattress room — an approach that makes the film feel less like passive viewing and more like a shared, bodily experience.

Surrender to the vibes

If you try to summarize the film’s plot you’ll end up tripping over adjectives: minotaurs, volcanic imagery, maps, helicopters, monsters, and other recurring fixations from Yorke and Donwood’s visual vocabulary. There is a loose thread — a minotaur’s journey into a strange, chromatic underworld — but the movie favors mood over exposition. The unease is the point: the sequence of images and sounds is meant to unsettle and to linger.

Nigel Godrich’s subtle, expansive handiwork

Nigel Godrich, credited as the film’s music producer, does more than lend his name. The long-time Radiohead producer reimagined tracks in spatial audio for the screening, adjusting song lengths, adding or subtracting instrumentation, and generally reshaping familiar moments in sly, studio-level ways. These are not novelty edits; they are thoughtful reworkings that keep the essence of the originals while nudging them into new spatial realities. Godrich’s touch is a reminder that production can be a narrative device as well as a technical exercise.

Deep cuts sound enormous

Some of the exhibit’s most affecting passages are the quieter, less obvious ones. Kid A’s near-ambient “Treefingers” becomes a wash of sound that envelopes the room; Amnesiac’s sun-bleached guitars on “Hunting Bears” arrive like a sudden physical light after an hour of electronic textures, punctuating a climactic turn in the film. And for the love of fans everywhere: if you used “How To Disappear Completely” as a bathroom-break anthem, expect a collective side-eye.

Why this still matters

Y2K style has rolled through a couple of cultural cycles, but the intellectual heft of Kid A and Amnesiac feels less nostalgic and more prescient. Themes of alienation, consumerism, technology run amok — the records have always traded in those currents, and seeing them refracted in 2026, after a pandemic and amid geopolitical and economic instability, gives the work renewed urgency. Kid A Mnesia is the kind of anniversary activation that could have been hollow; here, the timing feels deliberate rather than opportunistic.

For diehards and the casually curious alike, the installation is a rare chance to live inside Radiohead’s most experimental phase. Whether you come for the artwork, the reimagined mixes, or the communal, mattress-like viewing chamber, the Motion Picture House insists on one thing: that these records still reward being experienced physically, not just streamed.

Note: the exhibit offers a 30% student discount on Wednesdays.