Inside Radiohead’s Immersive Motion Picture House: 6 Takeaways

When audiences enter, the exhibit’s two-hour time allotment begins with a half-hour to wander the compound, where the rooms and halls surrounding the film theater feature posters of lyrics and drawings; rows of old, stacked televisions; and statues of varying sizes representing some of the characters in the film. Radiohead experts will immediately clock the iconography, but it’s a disorienting experience, heightened by an ambient hum and faint snippets of Kid A‘s “Motion Picture Soundtrack” and “Idioteque.” The film rewards close scrutiny beforehand, though; as various motifs from the exhibit pop up during the movie, viewers would be forgiven for replicating the “Leonardo DiCaprio pointing at the screen” meme from Once Upon A Time In Hollywood.

Sure, its now commonplace for movie theaters to have comfortable, reclining chairs for audiences. But Kid A Mnesia is something else entirely. In the movie viewing area, the floor’s light padding extends a few feet up slightly slanted walls. Four large padded benches form a square in the center of the room, and gigantic screens on each of the four walls tilt slightly downward toward the audience. Before the playback begins, screens encourage fans to “sit, lay or lean anywhere” – and the layout is conducive to all three. All told, it’s like a cross between Sphere’s hyperstimulating environment and the little rooms at art museums where films play on loop.

A description of the Kid A Mnesia book says it “chronicles [Yorke and Donwood’s] obsessions at the time: minotaurs, genocide, maps, globalization, monsters, pylons, damns, volcanoes, locusts, lightning, helicopters, Hiroshima, show homes and ring roads.” The film is a heady amalgam of most of those things, and while there is a loose plot – a minotaur discovers and journeys through an odd hidden world full of supernatural colors and mysterious creatures with unclear motives – trying to untangle more specifics is a fool’s errand. Nevertheless, it’s an engrossing watch, not just because of the music, but because of the uneasiness it evokes.

The revered British producer – who has produced all of Radiohead’s albums since 1997’s OK Computer, as well as Yorke’s three solo records – is credited as the producer for the film’s music, but that’s not just because he produced the albums that soundtrack it. For the movie, Godrich created new mixes in spatial audio, presenting these familiar songs in fresh ways; some go longer, some go shorter, several add or lose pieces of instrumentation. It’s sly studio wizardry to tinker with such well-known tracks without losing their essence – but while moving them forward creatively.

To many Radiohead obsessives, the idea that any song from Kid A or Amnesiac, or even their overall sessions, could be considered a “deep cut” is laughable. And yet, some of the musical highlights of Kid A Mnesia arrive at unexpected moments, often aided by producer Nigel Godrich’s souped-up versions: Kid A‘s nearly ambient “Treefingers” becomes an enveloping sonic bath; the sun-fried guitars of Amnesiac‘s “Hunting Bears” are particularly stark when they arrive well into the film, after an hour of largely electronic instrumentation and at a climatic moment in the narrative. But to the fans who used “How To Disappear Completely” for a bathroom break: shame on you.

Some Y2K aesthetics may have made a comeback, but the era’s pop culture has generally aged poorly; Kid A and Amnesiac have not. Long praised for their treatment of themes like consumerism, alienation and technology run amok, both albums remain thought-provoking – and 25 years later, with the recontextualization offered by Kid A Mnesiac, they scan as eerily prescient. A milestone anniversary is always a convenient excuse for this type of exhibit or activation. But for a band that has always fixated on society’s slow creep into dystopia, Kid A Mnesia‘s timing – following a pandemic, amid war and economic calamity, as artificial intelligence and other new technologies threaten to upend daily life – feels more deliberate.