Spoilers! How the bonkers ending of 'The Hunt' hinges on misinformation – and one epic 'whoops'

Spoiler alert! The following details the ending of "The Hunt," so beware if you haven't seen the movie yet.

A most dangerous game is afoot in the controversial social satire/horror thriller “The Hunt,” pitting liberal "elites" against right-wing “deplorables,” ending in one seriously wild climax and boiling down to an unfortunate instance of misinformation.

Finding new life in theaters after being canceled by outrage last year, director Craig Zobel’s gory action-fest follows Crystal (Betty Gilpin), one of the hunted who’s a Mississippi car rental employee and (luckily for her) skilled ex-soldier. She figures out what’s happening and turns the tables on her hunters, picking them off until ultimately finding their mysterious leader – disgraced businesswoman Athena (Hilary Swank) – and the two have an all-out, pan-throwing fight to the death in a kitchen.

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The left-wing cabal at the heart of “The Hunt” choose their conservative-leaning prey because of their actions in real life or online, and Crystal was selected because she trolled Athena under the Twitter handle “Justice for Y’all.” However, during their battle, Crystal reveals to Athena that she's mistaken and that's another Crystal with the same last name from her town. (She knows because she gets that woman’s mail all the time.)

Athena is skeptical. After they stab each other and are left bleeding on the floor, she asks Crystal one last time if she’s “Justice for Y’all” and Crystal says no. “Whoops,” says Athena before dying, leaving Crystal to pick herself up, gruesomely tend to her wounds, raid Athena’s closet for a stylish gown and commandeer a private jet home.

“Craig and I played with the idea that he was going to choose in the edit how much we wanted to reveal of Crystal,” Gilpin says. “We did takes in every scene where she's the right Crystal and the wrong Crystal. That last scene, getting to sort of finally peel a layer off of her brain and let you see inside for a second, it's the one time in the movie where we get to see her really like herself.”

Athena “picked the wrong Crystal in many ways,” Gilpin adds. And co-writer Damon Lindelof figures a little more Googling would have helped the chief antagonist: “Literally, just one more search line. Because you probably don't want a veteran to play in your little game.”

In one scene earlier in the film, the elites are planning their hunt – a crazy conspiracy theory brought to bloody, ultraviolent life – and “there's more information to be had about Crystal, but Athena doesn't want to hear it,” Lindelof says. “She's like, ‘Stop, I've heard enough. I know who that is based on this photograph that I'm seeing and what her name is and the state that she comes from.’ And I do feel like both (political) sides do that. We're much more complicated than we give ourselves credit for.”

The ending reflects America's current issues with distorted facts and truth. “People can have a 20-minute diatribe against something that they believe has happened and then turn around and realize that none of that is accurate or was even what the other person was talking about,” Zobel says. “If we're satirizing a bunch of things in the film, the thing that we're satirizing the most is just this assumption that you know more than the other person and that there is no consequence to that either. So to have all of this stuff be wrong and have Athena just say at the end, ‘Whoops,’ it just felt right.”

Lindelof loves the “whoops.” “Probably most people in their moment of death, it's closer to ‘Whoops’ than it is to, ‘You know what? I think I kind of nailed it. I'm having like a real moment of clarity,’ ” he says. “There's something that's profound about your last conscious thought being, 'I was wrong.' It's a good functioning metaphor for my best wishes for this movie.”

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: 'The Hunt' spoilers: Whoops! Here's how the controversial movie ends