With Fall officially on its way and the Halloween season fast approaching, movie theaters are taking a turn for the spooky with the latest entry into the Conjuring Universe: The Nun -- and, well, if you're looking for a way to get into the holiday mood, you really don't need to look any further.

As the fifth entry into the Conjuring franchise, director Corin Hardy's The Nun has a lot of room to work. Following a loosely Marvel-like methodology of spin offs and call backs weaving a web of continuity across multiple films, there are some things here that require a bit of prerequisite knowledge -- most of which the movie works to establish with bookended scenes that call back to both The Conjuring and The Conjuring 2. That said, if you're not a Conjuring expert, that's okay -- you don't really need to be. Hardy, with the aid of writers James Wan and Gary Dauberman, have succeeded in making something that, by and large, does stand on its own.

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The movie centers around Father Burke (Demian Bicher) and Sister Irene (Taissa Farmiga), an unlikely duo sent by the vatican to investigate a mysterious suicide at a remote monastery in Romania. Burke is what's known informally as a "miracle hunter" -- someone employed by the Church to investigate unusual occurrences, while Irene is a nun-in-training (she's yet to take her official vows) who got the attention of the Vatican as a child after having a series of strange, seemingly prophetic visions. Burke and Irene meet up with "Frenchie" (Jonas Bloquet) a Canadian expat and globe trotter who lives in the village and who found the body of the nun who had committed suicide.

Predictably, things start going south almost immediately with a rash of spooky occurrences that escalate in intensity all throughout Burke and Irene's investigation. The monastery itself, the locals say, is cursed; full of some nameless and pervasive evil that has slowly begun leaking out into the town itself. Said evil manifests in any number of ways: actual zombie-like monsters, hallucinations, horrible nightmare visions, innocuous creep-out moments like ghostly radios playing -- you name it. The Nun has scares-a-plenty.

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Plot-wise, things begin to get a bit muddled. There are essentially three main characters with three different motivations experiencing three different brands of terror simultaneously, which isn't inherently bad as much as it is unnecessarily unfocused every now and again. The second act has a colossal and transparent exposition dump about the monastery and its history, as well as the origin of the "evil" within it that is very nearly delivered by someone speaking directly into the camera which feels a bit too utilitarian for the mood of the film. There are a handful of scenes that probably should have wound up on the cutting room floor.

However, for all the story seems to struggle with its own limited attention span, it makes up for occasionally getting lost in the weeds by having so much fun wandering. The Nun's ultimate saving grace is how self aware it stays from beat one to the credits rolling, and how surprisingly hilarious it manages to be throughout. This movie is laugh out loud funny on more than one occasion, which offers a welcome pressure release for the suspense and the tension of the otherwise overwhelmingly gothic horror throughout. It never falls too far into the self-serious pitfalls of big horror blockbusters: yes, we're dealing with demons and death and the stakes are high, but that doesn't mean we can't have a good time along the way.

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The fun is bolstered by stellar performances from Farmiga and Bloquet, who have such fantastic and believable chemistry in each one of their scenes, it's hard not to want another spin off focused exclusively on them. The overall look of the film certainly doesn't hurt, either; each shot revels in the over-the-top gothic camp of the movie's atmosphere with tons of stark black-and-white contrasts, gooey, extravagantly corrupted religious iconography and plenty of visual call backs to horror classics like Bram Stoker's Dracula and The Exorcist.

All told, The Nun may not be the strongest member of the Conjuring Universe family in a technical sense, but that's hardly a sin worth holding against it. It's simply having too much fun being exactly what it wants, whenever it wants, however it wants, to feel like the minor stumbles or fatty bits were actually detrimental at all. If you're looking for a good, gloriously spooky, genuinely fun way to kick off your Halloween movie watching, The Nun is a great place to start.

Directed by Corin Hardy, stars Demián Bichir, Taissa Farmiga and Jonas Bloquet. The film arrives in theaters everywhere on September 7.