Does anyone else feel like October is, simultaneously, the best and worst month of the year? Maybe it's that Libra season energetic balance of the good with the bad (or maybe I'm just a Gemini), but it really is emblematic of the ultimate example of death and rebirth: the leaves are falling beautifully and the spooks are spooking spookily; everything has gotten dark but also cozy and pumpkin-flavoured. MUBI is catering to all of these whims with their slate of new curated programming for the new month.
Led by the arthouse platform's New Coven: A Female Horror Renaissance collection, MUBI is embracing the magic of the moment in addition to looking back at how we got to it. As Coralie Fargeat's Demi Moore-led The Substance takes theatres, the director's 2017 neo-feminist thriller Revenge is adrenalized with the same fascination with transformation, and is already available to stream.
New arrivals in the collection include the 2019 Jennifer Reeder mystery Knives and Skin, as well as Susanne Deeken's 2023 short A Place without Fear. More thrills come in the form of The Loneliest Planet, which follows American couple Alex (Gael García Bernal) and Nica (Hani Furstenberg) as they backpack through Eastern Europe and are forced to reconsider everything they had previously believed about themselves. If you're craving more influencer-adjacent frights, an 18-year-old girl's life is put on hold when she falls under the spell of a mysterious vlogger in Coma.
Lighten things up with the latest addition to MUBI's Humor and Melancholy: The Cinema of Martín Rejtman collection The Practice, which follows two yoga teachers in the midst of a cancelled trip to India. South African artist William Kentridge also documents his own practice of creating wall-sized charcoal drawings of vistas from his childhood in Self-Portrait as a Coffee Pot, while The Blue Room sees a man and woman who are secretly in love with each other end up alone in a room — and then, somehow under investigation by the police.
Revel in all of October's mystifying delights by checking out the full list of MUBI's new arrivals below, and keeping tabs on what else is next on streaming for the month.
October 1
The Loneliest Planet
The Blue Room
Knives and Skin
October 4
A Place Without Fear
The Practice
October 11
Coma
October 18
Self-Portrait as a Coffee Pot