VLC player behaves wild on Linux Mint when screen goes off

I watch an episode of a series, and then it randomly starts to heat up my CPU. The most reproducible case is when the episode ended while I'm not looking at it, then the PC get locked and the screen gets turned off, and VLC then, on a pause, starts to use 20%+ percents of my CPU and get completely unresponsive before I kill the process of it. If it was in fullscreen before, it'd show just a dark screen before I alt+f4 out from it. It doesn't use as much resources when it plays videos, so I guess it's VLC not reacting right to some system conditions? I'm a noob so it's just a guess.

As a side note, what do you use for watching shows? I still can't find a player that I'm 100% comfortable with. MPC-HC is what I used on Windows for years and I'm too used to how it works it seems, but I'm open to try something lightweight with simple controls to choose languages on the go.