The wood-paneled elevator that ferries guests up to “Flight” at the McKittrick Hotel rises at a languid pace, and the tinny, piped-in music sounds like something out of a speakeasy. Atmospherically, it seems an awkward match with the show you’ve come to see, about a pair of Afghan child refugees crossing Europe in search of sanctuary.

So does the McKittrick, not a hotel at all but the sprawling Chelsea complex that is the longtime home of the immersive-theater behemoth “Sleep No More,” where spectators roam dimly lit halls on multiple floors, traipsing through rooms that are essentially art installations in which performances periodically break out.

Created by the Scottish company Vox Motus, and a hit at the Edinburgh International Festival, “Flight” is 180 degrees different from that vast and ambulatory production — still, intimate, visceral, rendered on a Lilliputian scale and requiring you to do nothing but watch and listen. Intricately designed yet with no live performers, it is arguably not even theater. But it is pulse-pounding, immersive storytelling, strange and exquisite and intensely affecting.

As you’re led to it in the dark, your seat looks like a library carrel, partitioned off like all of the others. You sit, you don a pair of headphones and in a few moments the show will appear, tableaus inside a succession of little windows, lit up one by one and slowly revolving on a carousel.