“Anima,” the new solo album by Thom Yorke of Radiohead, has artistic tentacles. Its arrival coincides with a short film and within that, a dance — elusive, dreamlike and worthy of its leading man: a singer who knows how to move.

The film’s choreography, set to three songs from “Anima,” begins normally enough as subway commuters collectively begin to nod off. Hands catch drooping heads in last-minute saves. Soon enough, their bodies form a collective as they execute an eerie, eccentric pattern of gestures, transforming them from humans into corporeal machinery.

Later, references flash by: to Buster Keaton, Mary Poppins, the film “Metropolis.” Yet this Netflix production is a love story with Mr. Yorke, its lithe oddball hero, in pursuit of a soulful, dark-haired woman he spotted on the train. (She is Dajana Roncione, an Italian actress and Mr. Yorke’s real-life partner.) When the commuters exit, she follows suit, leaving her lunchbox behind. With the off-kilter grace of Keaton, Mr. Yorke is on a mission: to retrieve the object, which hints at Mary Poppins’s carpetbag as well as her strange world of enchantment, and find her.

“It’s this idea of Alice following the rabbit,” said Damien Jalet, the film’s choreographer. “Or finding the loved one in this labyrinth.”