Tore is a lonely funeral home worker who lives with his father, Bosse (Peter Haber), and hangs out with his dog and best friend, Linn (Sanna Sundqvist). His father encourages him to step out of his comfort zone and leave the nest, something Tore doesn’t take kindly to. He wants to meander through daily life with the security blanket of his childhood abode and his patriarchal figurehead, but detours in life often come fast and furiously. Bosse gets hit by a truck on the same morning as this conversation takes place, and Tore’s reaction to his loving dad’s demise is, for lack of a better word, abhorrent. He doesn’t cry, get watery-eyed, or even react in the slightest to what happens. Instead, Tore goes on with his day and blocks out the trauma.
The reaction of Tore to this triggering event sets up the series’ crux perfectly. He isolates himself from Linn and his pup, even selling the labrador to a complete stranger by the middle of the six episodes. He puts on a thick mask that is held up by negative influences and stimulants such as drug-binged parties and sex-crazed randos on dating apps. He resents the life he was living before, but his attempts to apostatize from the mundane and the unfulfilling in the aftermath of his father’s death manifest in dark, morbid manners.
The aesthetic of Tore can hang like an ominous cloud over the audience. The marketing materials for the series say the look the directors were going for should remind people of Euphoria or Sex Education, but there really isn’t enough color in the world to feel like a symmetrical analogy. The palette is broody and moody, with a plethora of grays, blues, and purples used. Even when the lights of a rave come on, an absence of bright shades like yellow or orange blares in the viewer’s eyeballs. Tore most certainly serves as an antithesis to everything some queer people disliked about Heartstopper.
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Tore is a half-glass empty reality check for LGBTQ+ youth looking for a sign of life getting better. It’s not going to be a peaceful escape for viewers with mental health struggles but rather an in-depth reenactment of how arduous the 20s can be for so many. It might bear so eerily reminiscent of audiences’ own lives that it could be triggering. Whether this is positive or negative really depends on the person watching, but the craftsmanship put into the storytelling is as sturdy as any other queer show to come out this year.
No LGBTQ+ series would be complete without a romance. One of the only uplifting relationships Tore falls into is with a soft-spoken, amicable florist near his house. Erik (Hannes Fohlin) seems to be the beacon of not only the virginity loss that Tore lusts for but also a true male kinship outside of his family home. Like most things for the downtrodden titular protagonist, it ends in heartbreak when Erik’s ex-boyfriend interrupts a moment of intimacy, ruining the vibe and the potential for future growth between Tore and Erik. The will-they won’t-they setup probably conjures a more relatable audience reaction than the serene Nick and Charlie ship from Heartstopper, but once again, whether someone enjoys realism or fantasy in their TV romances is to each their own.
One must truly watch through the end to comprehend the entirety of the pain and the reawakening Tore succeeds through. The final episode saves the program from becoming obsessed with its own grim reaper, allowing Tore to heal from his loss and look hesitantly into the future with Linn and a local drag queen, Shady Meat (Carlos Romero Cruz), by his side. Found family certainly presides as a theme in a large majority of queer programming, and the thesis of Tore religiously abides by this LGBTQ+ doctrine. The final shot of the series poignantly captures the growth the main character underwent in such a brief time period, and it balances the fatalism of the script.
