Welfare Warriors, on Viaplay

There is no Scandinavian “efficiency” in this Finnish welfare office. However, there is toxic mold and possibly even a ghost. It would be a grim place to spend eternity, but perhaps a fitting one, considering benefits-seekers feel like it takes forever to talk to a live person. Yet, when their numbers are finally called, the case-workers must spend no more than seven-minutes on their consultation, according to government mandate. Eelis Jarvinen tried to explain his frustration to the office manager, Anneli Tiainen, but when she didn’t listen, he took a header off the building. Until things get better, Jarvinen will keep haunting Tiainen and the rest of his former colleagues, thereby making the current situation even worse in director-co-writer Tiina Lymi’s three-episode Welfare Warriors, which premieres Thursday on Viaplay.

Tiainen feels somewhat guilty for blowing off Jarvinen in his darkest hour, but everyone else in the office has more pressing concerns, like “maintaining the dignity of the civil service” and “preserving the welfare state.” The former certainly won’t be happening in Welfare Warriors.

Soon, Tiainen notices weird and inexplicable phenomenon around the office, but she is too tired to even respond. Out of desperation, she creates six fake dummy corporations to sponsor fake worker training for 2,000 of their toughest fake-job-searching cases. Of course, such massive success gets noticed by the bureaucracy, who devise a more ambitious “hyper-enabling” pilot program, for which Tiainen’s office will be the guinea pigs.

Panicked to cover her tracks, Tiainen enlists the help of Seppo Isomaki, who is keenly aware of each and every one of his entitlements as a unionized civil service employee. Jarvinen also does his Grudge-like business, but Lymi and co-writer Juha Lehtola are almost too preoccupied with bureaucratic politics to notice, at least during the first episode.

Admittedly, the supernatural activity picks up somewhat in the next two installments, but it always takes a backseat to social commentary. While there is an oft-repeated plea to protect the welfare state largesse, some of the acerbic dialogue cuts both ways. Indeed, not one single second of Welfare Warriors inspires confidence in the ultra-privileged Finnish civil service.

As Tiainen and Isomaki, Elina Knihtila and Hannu-Pekka Bjorkman certainly look sufficiently unglamorous to work in a mold-infested welfare office. They also have their particularly eccentricities that never let up, no matter how much we might hope. Nevertheless, their work is brutally honest. Jarkko Niemi’s performance as Pasi, the recently dumped case-worker, who is contemptuous of his “work-wife” Sanna, because of her torch-carrying, is also brutally true-to-life.

Frankly, Welfare Warriors might be more honest than Lymi and Lehtola intended or realized. They even show how able-bodied frauds exploit the system. When Jarvinen has a chance to get on with the haunting, the series is also quite scary. In fact, a couple of the supernatural sequences are rather inspired. It is somewhat inconsistent, but in interestingly messy ways. Plus, the three full-hour-long episodes are relatively easy to chug through. Recommended as an odd curiosity piece, Welfare Warriors starts streaming this Thursday (5/7) on Viaplay.