You assume the video file actually had more information that other players don't show it.
You're wrong.
It makes more sense to put the blame on VLC. It may use some algorithms to adjust brightness or gamma that have some rounding errors or those algorithms may have some optimizations (for speed purposes) that cause artefacts in some rare cases or edge cases, but 99.999% of the time work perfectly well.
Think of it like Quake's inverse square root -
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_inverse_square_root - which produces a "eh, good enough" result in much much shorter time compared to regular calculations - an algorithm could use such approximations that produce that "eh, good enough" conversion to another gamma or brightness , but once in a while produce some artefacts.
Oh ... and don't rule out the video codecs used to compress the video as I assume you don't use raw footage. Codecs work with blocks of 8x8 to 64x64 blocks of pixels, and compress the contents, and there's key frames, predicted frames etc etc
In addition to that, modern video codecs don't use RGB when compressing, they convert the image to YV12 (luminance and Chrominances YCbCr - in YV12 the luminance is stored fully, but Cb and Cr are stored as average of the value of 4 pixels at a time)
It's possible for some bug in VLC to occur in the pipeline decode video to raw yv12 -> apply gamma/brightness --> convert yv12 to RGB --> copy to video card memory buffer and render on screen.