The Hunt Ending’s Real Meaning Explained

Warning! Major spoilers for The Hunt below

With the cancellation of its original 2019 release, The Hunt proved to be an incredibly controversial movie. Once the movie rose from the dead and made its way to screens in early 2020, audiences were able to see what made the movie so controversial, even down to its twist ending.

As shown in the trailers, the movie is essentially about a group who decide to hunt people for sport — it’s the hunters vs. the hunted, portrayed by a very talented, impressive cast of veteran actors. Much to the hunters’ surprise, one of their targets, Crystal (Betty Gilpin), fights back and ends up picking off the hunters one by one. She makes it back to the leader of the hunters, Athena (Hilary Swank), and the two women have one final showdown.

The Hunt‘s ending is both politically-charged and a little open-ended, and those associated have already discussed ideas for a potential sequel, should the film do well enough for one to be green-lit. Here’s a breakdown of everything that happens in The Hunt‘s ending.

The Hunt’s Origin Explained

The Hunt kicks things off with a bit of sleight of hand. The film opens with a shot of a text thread between a group of people joking about hunting people. The audience is meant to assume this is business as usual amongst a group of people who seem to be planning a twisted hunt. But at the end of the movie, it’s revealed that the text chain happened a year prior to the events of the film. Athena and her friends all have high-ranking, corporate positions. The text chain gets leaked and nicknamed Manorgate, which leads to her and all her friends getting terminated from their jobs.

The group is fuming, so they decided to make their joke a reality. Athena and her friends manage to track down the people who posted about their alleged hunt online. They train for months, hire a military consultant, and manage to kidnap the people responsible for exposing their text chain. They drop their prospective victims in the middle of nowhere, and the hunt is on. In the minds of the hunters, this is justified. By spreading rumors about Athena and her friends, they inadvertently pushed the hunt into reality. These people were conspiracy theorists who took their theories too far, so the hunters decided to give them a taste of their own medicine.

Was Betty Glipin The Real Crystal May?

Every antagonist needs a good speech to reveal their diabolical plan. While Athena reveals hers to Crystal, a surprising fact is revealed — the hunters got the wrong Crystal. Athena says she was going after a Crystal who used the name Justice4Yall on an online forum. Crystal informs her that’s a different person in her hometown with the same name — she’s Crystal Mae and Gilpin is Crystal May. Gilpin’s Crystal says their mail gets mixed up constantly. Crystal and Athena have a final violent showdown in the film’s climax, and Athena ultimately dies from her wounds. With her dying breaths, Athena asks Crystal if really is Justice4Yall. Once again, Crystal denies it, but Athena doesn’t believe her.

Ultimately, Crystal’s identity is left up in the air. Given the underlying message of the film, it can be assumed that Crystal was telling the truth, and she was not Justice4Yall. The Hunt is all about the dangers of social media and being too connected. Information travels fast — faster than can be verified, sometimes. Every member of the hunted posted about Manorgate without much concrete proof beyond the text chain and evidence that Athena owned a home in a remote location. Athena’s group wanted to teach these people a lesson about what happens when you don’t verify facts. So, it would be an appropriate and cruel twist of irony that the hunters got the wrong Crystal. Because they didn’t do thorough research, they ended up kidnapping a person with military training, and she got the last laugh in the end.

Was Don Really A Mole?

During The Hunt, Crystal runs into a man named Don who claims he is also being hunted. They team up and together make their way into the hunters’ camp. Just when Crystal is ready to bring Don with her to take on Athena, a startling message comes over the radio — Athena reveals Don to be one of the hunters, who is supposedly infiltrating the hunted as a mole. Naturally, Crystal shoots him on the spot.

When Crystal and Athena are fighting to the death, Athena cruelly reveals that Don was never part of her group. It was all a ruse to trick Crystal. This element of The Hunt is left to be more open-ended than Crystal’s true identity, but it’s probably safe to say Athena was actually telling the truth in this case. The Hunt is all about the dangers of believing a statement before getting any real, concrete evidence. Crystal didn’t even give Don an opportunity to state his case. Athena told her Don was a mole, so Crystal just immediately decided to kill him.

Snowball: What The Hunt’s Animal Farm Reference Means

At the end of the film, Athena calls Crystal their “Snowball.” Crystal questioned why Athena would call her that, and the lead hunter cruelly explained that it’s a reference to George Orwell’s Animal Farm. Simply put, she was calling Crystal a pig. However, Crystal shocks Athena by informing her that, not only has she read Animal Farm, but she believes Athena is more similar to Snowball than she is. In the book, Snowball is a capable leader, but believes pigs are far superior to any other animal out there. He believes in a cause so fervently that it essentially drives him mad, which is directly on-point with the film’s overall messaging about belief systems and being able to analyze a situation from a different point of view.

What Is The Hunt’s Political Message?

Despite some of the controversy this movie drummed up in the six months leading to its eventual release, this movie isn’t about pitting the left side of the political spectrum against the right. Instead, it’s about what happens when people take “political correctness” culture too far. With PC culture, people’s words and motivations are overly scrutinized. Thanks to social media, interpretations and theories behind those words and motivations can spread like wildfire. Of course, this often pits the left and right against each other, and sometimes situations can go to the extreme, just as is portrayed in The Hunt. In many ways, the film predicted the outrage that surrounded its own pre-release in an ironic twist.

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