Some films entertain you. Others stay with you for days, sitting in your chest like a held breath. Matthew Fifer and Kieran Mulcare’s Cicada (2020) belongs firmly in the second category. It is a tender, devastating, and ultimately hopeful romantic drama about two men in Brooklyn who find each other while each carrying wounds they have never spoken aloud.
When I first watched Cicada, I expected a simple indie love story. What I got was a layered meditation on how unprocessed trauma shapes every relationship we try to build. The film weaves together childhood sexual abuse, PTSD, the coming-out experience, and the fragile beauty of human connection into something that earned a 93 percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes.
This article breaks down the Cicada movie ending explained in full detail, along with the film’s major themes of trauma, healing, and vulnerability. Whether you just finished the film and felt emotionally wrecked, or you are researching it for the first time, you will find everything laid out clearly below.
Table of Contents
Plot Synopsis: What Is the Movie Cicada About?
Cicada follows Ben (played by co-director Matthew Fifer), a young bisexual man in late-2012 Brooklyn navigating a string of casual hookups and a fog of unprocessed pain. He meets Sam (Sheldon D. Brown), a man who is closeted to his family and carrying his own buried trauma. The two fall into a relationship that feels electric and fragile at the same time.
The film is set against the backdrop of the Jerry Sandusky child sexual abuse trial, which played out in the news during late 2012. Audio from the trial bleeds into the film’s soundscape, creating an ambient pressure that mirrors what Ben is suppressing inside himself.
As the relationship deepens, both men are forced to confront what they have been running from. Ben carries the weight of childhood sexual abuse he has never told anyone about. Sam carries the aftershocks of a violent shooting he survived, along with the pressure of staying closeted in a family and culture that demand a specific version of masculinity.
The film does not rush toward a dramatic reveal. Instead, it lets the trauma seep through small moments: a flinch, a panic, a sudden distance, an inability to say what is wrong. This slow-burn approach drew comparisons to Andrew Haigh’s Weekend, a film celebrated for its intimate, honest portrayal of two men connecting over a short window of time.
Main Characters: Ben and Sam
Ben is the emotional center of Cicada. He is funny, self-deprecating, and clearly surviving rather than living. His hypochondria, his avoidance of real intimacy, and his compulsive need to keep things surface-level all function as armor built from unprocessed abuse. He has told no one what happened to him as a child, and that silence has calcified into a way of being.
Sam is in some ways the opposite and in other ways the mirror. He is quieter, more guarded, and navigating the additional burden of being a closeted Black man whose family does not know he is attracted to men. His trauma comes from a real shooting incident, which the film integrates in a way that feels visceral rather than exploitative.
What makes these two characters work is that neither is positioned as the wounded one and the healer. Both are damaged. Both are trying. Both fail each other in small ways and try again. The film refuses the savior narrative that undermines so many trauma stories.
Supporting characters, including Ben’s therapist and the people orbiting the couple’s Brooklyn world, add texture without derailing the central relationship. The therapy scenes in particular serve as quiet turning points where the film’s philosophy about healing becomes explicit: speaking the words aloud is the beginning of freedom.
Cicada Ending Explained
The ending of Cicada does not wrap things up in a neat bow, and that is precisely what makes it powerful. Ben and Sam do not ride off into a simplified happy ending. Instead, the film closes with a sense that the hardest, most important work is just beginning.
The key moment comes when Ben finally speaks about his abuse. In a scene often described as the film’s emotional climax, Ben breaks his silence. This is not a dramatic courtroom confession or a cinematic breakdown. It is a raw, hesitant, painful act of telling another human being what happened. The film treats this act as monumental in itself, separate from any resolution that might follow.
Director Matthew Fifer has been open about the fact that this scene reflects his own experience. In interviews he has said that the act of saying the words out loud, of bringing darkness into light, was the thing that mattered most. The film’s ending honors that belief by making speech, not resolution, the turning point.
For Sam, the ending carries a parallel weight. He must decide whether to continue hiding or to begin living more openly. The film does not show us a clean answer. What it shows is that the relationship between Ben and Sam has become a space where honesty is possible, even if it is terrifying.
The final feeling is one of cautious hope. These two men have not solved their trauma. They have not erased their pasts. But they have done the single hardest thing: they have stopped carrying it alone in total silence. The cicada, after years underground, has finally emerged.
Cicada Symbolism Explained
The cicada metaphor is the film’s central image, and Matthew Fifer has explained it directly in interviews. Cicadas spend years, sometimes over a decade, buried underground in darkness and silence. Then they emerge, shed their shells, and sing.
Only male cicadas sing. They make noise to be heard, to find connection, to signal that they exist. Fifer has connected this directly to the experience of male trauma survivors, particularly those conditioned by culture to stay silent. The act of making sound, of being heard, is the act of survival made visible.
This is why the film is called Cicada. Ben has been underground for years, living in the dark soil of unspoken abuse. The film is the story of his emergence. The shell he sheds is the silence. The song he learns to sing is the truth finally spoken.
The metaphor also extends to Sam, who has been buried in a different kind of silence: the silence of the closet, the silence of a man taught that vulnerability is weakness. Both characters are cicadas waiting for the moment they can emerge.
Cicada Ending Explained and Its Themes of Trauma
To fully understand the Cicada movie ending explained in terms of its trauma themes, it helps to look at the major threads the film weaves together.
The first theme is childhood sexual abuse and the architecture of silence it builds. Ben’s entire personality, his humor, his avoidance, his hypochondria, is constructed around a secret he has never broken. The film shows how abuse does not live in a single memory but spreads into every corner of a person’s life, shaping how they love, how they trust, and how they see themselves.
The second theme is PTSD and the body’s refusal to forget. Sam’s trauma from the shooting lives in his nervous system. The film depicts this not through dramatic flashbacks but through smaller signs: tension, withdrawal, a guardedness that others might read as coldness. The film understands that trauma is not just a story you tell. It is a pattern your body repeats.
The third theme is healing through connection and vulnerability. Neither Ben nor Sam heals in isolation. They heal because someone else is willing to sit with them in the mess. The film argues that intimacy, real intimacy, is the antidote to trauma. But intimacy requires the very thing trauma destroys: the willingness to be seen.
The fourth theme is the political and cultural silence around male trauma. The Sandusky trial playing in the background is not decoration. It is the cultural echo of Ben’s private secret. The film draws a line between a society that struggles to talk about male sexual abuse and an individual man who cannot speak his own truth.
The Sandusky Trial Audio Motif
One of the most distinctive choices in Cicada is the use of real audio from the Jerry Sandusky trial as a recurring sonic backdrop. Sandusky, a former Penn State assistant football coach, was convicted in 2012 of sexually abusing multiple boys over many years. The trial dominated news coverage during the exact period in which the film is set.
Fifer layered trial audio into the film’s soundscape as a diegetic element, meaning it exists within the world of the story. Ben hears it on the news, on the radio, in passing conversations. It is everywhere, unavoidable, a constant external reminder of the very thing he is trying not to feel internally.
This choice is brilliant because it externalizes Ben’s interior state. He cannot escape the story because the entire culture is talking about it. The trial becomes a kind of ambient pressure, tightening around him, making his silence feel louder with each passing day. When Ben finally speaks, part of what he is pushing against is not just his own fear but a cultural silence that has made his story feel unspeakable.
LGBTQ+ Representation and Relationship Dynamics
Cicada stands out in queer cinema for several reasons, and its approach to LGBTQ+ representation is one of them. Ben is bisexual, a identity still underrepresented and frequently misunderstood in film. The film does not treat his bisexuality as a phase, a punchline, or a source of confusion. It is simply part of who he is.
The relationship between Ben and Sam is an interracial gay romance that the film treats with both tenderness and honesty. The challenges they face are not generic obstacles invented for drama. They are specific to who these men are: their histories, their families, their cultures, the ways they have learned to protect themselves.
Crucially, Cicada refuses the tragic queer ending that has defined so much of LGBTQ+ film history. No one dies. No one is punished for loving. The film’s optimism is not naive; it acknowledges that healing is hard and ongoing. But it insists that queer people deserve stories where survival and love coexist.
This is why the film draws so many comparisons to Weekend. Both films are intimate, talk-driven, and honest about the difficulty of queer connection. But Cicada goes further by placing trauma recovery at the center, making it not just a love story but a story about what love makes possible.
Semi-Autobiographical Elements and Real-Life Integration
Cicada is deeply semi-autobiographical. Matthew Fifer based Ben’s story on his own experience of childhood sexual abuse and his own journey toward speaking about it. This is why the therapy scenes feel so lived-in and why Ben’s emotional arc carries the weight of something true.
The film also incorporates a real-life event in a way that blurs the line between fiction and documentary. Sheldon D. Brown, who plays Sam, is a real shooting survivor. The film integrates his actual experience into Sam’s character, giving the PTSD storyline an authenticity that scripted trauma rarely achieves.
This integration was a deliberate creative choice. Fifer and Mulcare wanted the trauma in their film to feel real because it was real. The result is a film that carries the texture of lived experience in every frame.
Knowing this context deepens the ending. When Ben finally speaks, you are watching a character break free. But you are also watching an artist process his own history through art. The film becomes not just a story about healing but an act of healing itself.
Critical Reception and Why This Film Matters
Cicada premiered at Outfest and went on to earn a 93 percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes. It received an Independent Spirit Award nomination, a significant recognition for an ultra-low-budget independent film made outside the studio system.
Critics praised the film for its honesty, its tenderness, and its refusal to sensationalize trauma. The Hollywood Reporter described it as a film about confronting trauma and the difficult work of being kind to yourself. Reviewers consistently highlighted the chemistry between Fifer and Brown and the film’s sensitive handling of material that could easily have been exploitative.
For survivors who have watched the film, the response has been deeply personal. Many have described Cicada as therapeutic to watch, a film that makes them feel seen without being reduced to their wounds. That reaction is perhaps the strongest validation of what Fifer and Mulcare set out to do.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the movie Cicada about?
Cicada is a 2020 American romantic drama film about two men in Brooklyn, Ben and Sam, who fall into a relationship while each grappling with unprocessed trauma. Ben is a childhood sexual abuse survivor who has never told anyone what happened to him. Sam is a closeted shooting survivor dealing with PTSD. Set during the 2012 Sandusky trial, the film follows their fragile, tender connection as they each confront the secrets threatening to keep them apart.
What are the main themes in Cicada?
The main themes in Cicada are childhood sexual abuse and the silence it creates, PTSD and how trauma lives in the body, healing through vulnerability and human connection, and the cultural silence around male trauma. The film also explores coming out, bisexual representation, interracial gay relationships, and the idea that speaking your truth aloud is the first step toward freedom.
Is Cicada a LGBTQ+ film?
Yes, Cicada is firmly an LGBTQ+ film. It centers on a romantic relationship between two men and explores themes of coming out, bisexuality, and life in the closet. It premiered at Outfest, a major LGBTQ+ film festival, and is widely discussed within the context of queer cinema alongside films like Andrew Haigh’s Weekend.
How does Cicada end?
Cicada ends with Ben finally breaking his silence about his childhood sexual abuse. This act of speaking, rather than any dramatic resolution, is the film’s emotional climax. The ending carries cautious hope rather than a tidy conclusion, suggesting that Ben and Sam have not erased their trauma but have taken the hardest first step by stopping their silence and allowing someone else in.
What does the cicada symbolize in the movie?
The cicada symbolizes the journey from buried silence to emergence and voice. Cicadas spend years underground in darkness before emerging, shedding their shells, and singing. Director Matthew Fifer has connected this directly to male trauma survivors who have been conditioned to stay silent. The cicada’s emergence mirrors Ben’s act of finally speaking his truth.
Is Cicada based on a true story?
Cicada is semi-autobiographical. Co-director and star Matthew Fifer based Ben’s storyline on his own experience as a childhood sexual abuse survivor. Additionally, Sheldon D. Brown, who plays Sam, is a real shooting survivor, and his actual experience was integrated into the character. The film blends fiction with lived experience to create its authentic emotional texture.
Conclusion: Speaking the Words Aloud
Understanding the Cicada movie ending explained means understanding that the film’s power lies in what it refuses to do. It refuses to fix everything. It refuses to wrap trauma in a bow. It refuses to let its characters off the hook of their own history.
What it offers instead is something more honest: the idea that healing begins not when the pain ends but when the silence does. Ben and Sam do not walk away healed. They walk away less alone. In a culture that still struggles to talk about male trauma, sexual abuse, and the cost of the closet, that act of speaking is everything.
If you have not yet seen Cicada, seek it out. And if you or someone you know has experienced trauma similar to what this film portrays, remember the film’s core message: speaking the words aloud is where the light gets in.