Throwing a "Part One" in the title would have been nice.

Indian cinema can teach us many lessons: fight for your love, respect your family, never threaten the hero's mother, listen before jumping to conclusions, and don't make any vows unless you've had a  day or so to think it over, among others.  One of the most important lessons these movies can teach us, though, is never take your children to the fair, because one of them will inevitably get lost, leading to years of painful separation, mistaken identity, and a climactic fight scene before the truth finally comes out, and who has time for all that these days?  If the characters in Avatara Purusha (2022) had paid attention to this valuable lesson, they could have saved themselves a lot of trouble, though they would still have the black magic to deal with.

Twenty years ago, Yashodha (Sudharani) took her seven year old nephew Karna to the temple fair.  He vanished, and after a desparate search and a call to the police, she was forced to contact her brother Rama (P. Sai Kumar) and explain what happened.  Rama quietly shows her out of the house, and that was the last time that Yasodha saw her brother.  When she tells the story to her daughter Siri (Ashika Ranganath), Siri vows to reunite the family by finding Karna!

But that sounds kind of hard, given that the boy vanished twenty years ago, so instead she vows to reunite the family by hiring an actor to pretend to be Karna!  After a brief audition process she settles on "Overacting" Anil (Sharan), a junior artist in films with dreams of stardom and a tendency toward, well, overacting.  Still, Anil is a passionate performer, and Siri figures that's what she needs to make her aunt and uncle believe in their new "son."

As a first step, Siri invites herself to her uncle's house and announces that she's moving in.  At this point the sensible thing to do would be to get to know her family for a while and then eventually bring up the topic of her mother, but Siti is committed to her terrible plan, so she manages to "find" Anil-as-Karan thanks to amazing apps on her computer.

Rama is suspicious. His wife Susheela (Bhavya), who had spent the last two decades confined to her bed by grief, is ecstatic.  Soon she's walking and has resumed her normal life, and Rama, a practitioner of Ayurvedic medicine, considers putting up with the imposter "medicine" which is clearly helping his wife, so Anil stays.

 

Meanwhile, notorious black magician Darka (Ashutosh Rana) is searching for the Trishanku stone which will enable him to enter the parallel world of Trishanku, presented here as an empty celestial realm suspended between heaven and Earth.   he knows that the stone is in Rama's house, but it's protected by a powerful blessing placed by Rama's father Brahma (Ayyappa P. Sharma), and that protective aura can only be removed form within the house.  Normally this would be a problem, but the presence of a bumbling actor in the house presents an opportunity.

(There's actually a third plot, involving property rights, but it's relatively underdeveloped and mostly serves to give Anil an excuse for comedic shenanigans.)

There are a lot of Indian movies about people pretending to be vanished relatives and learning to love the family that they're conning; it's a well developed subgenre with its own tropes, so it's no surprise when the apparently real Karan (Srinigar Kitty) shows up and Anil has to leave his new family.  The subsequent black magic duel with fight choreography seemingly lifted from Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon is a bit more surprising.  

And then the movie ends on a cliffhanger, because this is apparently part one in a series, and part two doesn't seem to have started filming yet.  It's very abrupt, and it's hard to say much about the movie's theme and overall impact without knowing how everything turns out.  The only lesson I can really take from this is to avoid going to the fair altogether; it's just not worth dealing with the curses.