Is MUBI The New A24? How To Watch ‘The Substance’ With A MUBI Free Trial

By most measures, it’s been another big year for gold-standard indie distributor A24. Civil War became one of their all-time biggest grossers. They finished off their X trilogy with MaXXXine, the highest-grossing title of the bunch (and presumably a profitable driver toward their merch store). And they continue to put out movies like I Saw the TV Glow that feel both unlike anything else in theaters, and perfectly in sync with the studio’s brand. This weekend brings another crack at mainstream horror with Heretic, a thriller starring an against-type Hugh Grant as a manipulative weirdo playing cat-and-mouse games with a pair of young missionaries.

At the same time, A24’s grip on indie cool may have loosened a bit. Its biggest hit of the fall is We Live in Time, an earnest but not especially ambitious romantic drama that also looks and acts an awful lot like a Fox Searchlight movie. Meanwhile, one of the buzziest awards titles of the fall, Anora, belongs to A24’s fast-ascending rivals NEON, even though A24 released the previous two Sean Baker movies; Neon also scored with Longlegs, which outgrossed even Civil War. Another A24 alumnus, Robert Eggers, has his Nosferatu remake coming out through Focus Features. And opening opposite Heretic, albeit in far fewer theaters, is Bird, the new movie from Andrea Arnold (another A24 vet), getting a theatrical release courtesy of MUBI.

You may have heard of MUBI if you went to see its breakout film The Substance this fall – or especially if you watched it at home, where you could pay a one-time rental fee, or you could sign up for MUBI’s streaming service (they’re currently offering a 7-day free trial through Prime Video). That’s mostly what MUBI has been, at least in the U.S., for most of its nearly 15-year existence: a streaming service specializing in arthouse, independent, and world cinema titles. (Initially, the idea was that it added and subtracted a title every day, so at any given point, there were a month’s worth of movie-a-day selections available. Now it’s more akin to the Criterion Channel, without the focus on classics.) It’s sort of like: What if Netflix was A24?

In that sense, The Substance seems like a game-changer: The second MUBI film to gross over a million dollars in the U.S. (after Decision to Leave) also made nearly $42 million worldwide – a massive success for such a small distributor, and one that follows the trajectory of similar successes for A24 and Neon. (Just this year, $15 million domestic seemed to be the magic number for MaXXXine, Immaculate, and The Substance.)

So what does this mean for future MUBI releases? Well, Bird – which, like The Substance, will play in theaters for at least a few weeks before it flies onto the streaming service – very much feels like “old” A24, in that it’s both genuinely artsy in a way that would baffle a lot of mainstream audiences, and accessible enough to feel like a poppier version of the truly obscure titles that the streaming service favors. Like Arnold’s Fish Tank, it’s about a young woman played by a newcomer (Nykiya Adams), living a hardscrabble, impoverished life in England; like her American Honey, it attains a kind of musical exuberance amidst a lot of potential misery. Bailey (Adams) has a young father (Barry Keoghan) who fathered her as a teenager and is now embarking on an impulsive marriage (not to her mother) as Bailey seethes with annoyance and attempts to help the half-siblings who live with her mom – and may be subjected to abuse at the hands of her own new beau. Into this environment tumbles Bird (Franz Rogowski), an oddball stranger who, well, the whole thing takes a magical-realism turn that sounds at odds with Arnold’s handheld aesthetic, but actually syncs with her Malick-influenced lyricism.

Bird is not the next The Substance. It’s probably not even the next American Honey, which wasn’t a huge financial success even in the A24 realm. But it does feel like it could, potentially, connect with some other recent MUBI titles in a way that A24 and Neon movies sometimes feel like branches of the same tree. Obviously directors and writers and actors and producers are the ones who actually make movies, much moreso than studios or distributors. But it would be silly to pretend that these boutique and mini-major distributors don’t sometimes have certain shared qualities (or personnel).

To that end, Bird feels like it could help turn Franz Rogowski into their Robert Pattinson, Kristen Stewart, or Florence Pugh. He’s a weirder presence than any of those – even Pattinson in oddball mode, which is often a more overtly comic style of oddness – and not exactly my idea of a megastar in waiting. But Bird, his second “big” MUBI movie after the romantic drama Passages, takes advantage of his slightly uncanny, otherworldly quality – the feeling that he exists somewhere outside rational reality. (Passages did this too, but by casting him as an irresistible, manipulative pansexual lothario with terrible clothes. He seemed utterly resistible to me.) While Arnold is at it, she draws in Barry Keoghan for a more traditionally gregarious performance, making a character who should be a nuisance – an immature, unstable young father who seems unlikely to help lift his family out of squalor – into a weirdly lovable figure.

Bird also has the downtrodden English grit and female point of view seen in How to Have Sex, a MUBI theatrical release from earlier this year, now available to stream on the platform. That movie doesn’t have Bird’s flights of fancy; it’s downright harrowing at times. They share, however, an interest in the fleeting pleasures and lingering anxieties of young women who can only temporarily wrest control of their lives from any number of external social forces. And though Bird could not have much less in common tonally with The Substance, the two movies do have an overlapping rejection of subtlety as inherent virtue. They’re movies by women that are as brash and forceful about their central metaphors as any number of masculine auteurs.

These fleeting similarities may not linger in future MUBI releases, not least because they focus so heavily on international cinema, rather than sticking to the English-language fare that dominates A24 and Neon’s line-ups. In fact, a lack of unifying aesthetic may only strengthen MUBI’s case for the next hot indie distributor. A24’s Heretic is plenty of fun, but there’s something a little canned and carny-barker-ish about the way they’ve already selling overpriced blueberry-pie-scented candles in their shop, as a wink-wink to a detail in the movie that ultimately doesn’t have much thematic resonance. It’s just a canny piece of marketing, and the studio deserves credit for giving indie cinema a bit of the old ’90s razzle-dazzle in that department. There aren’t any Bird pop-up shops or memes that I’m aware of at the moment; whatever the movie’s flaws, Arnold has been given the room to express confusion and yearning that wouldn’t necessarily make sense on a designer t-shirt. Maybe that can be MUBI’s next-big-indie marketing hook: Save the vibes for the movie.

Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com, too.