This article will focus on the aesthetic element of cinematography in Gaspar Noé’s 2002 film Irreversible, and its function of affecting the spectator on a physiological and psychological level. The methodology used for this purpose poses aesthetics as a confrontation with the spectator, and studies the resulting direct physiological and psychological modulations. I wish to move away from what Herbert Zettl terms “applied media aesthetics,” in which media elements “clarify, intensify, and interpret events for a large audience” (14). Instead, this article will approach formalist studies of cinema from a more radical direction: the field of “haptic cinema,” a model for theories of spectator affect. While the concept of haptics, derived from the Greek verb “haptesthai” meaning “to touch” (“Haptics”), is discussed in a range of fields (mechanical engineering, psychology, literature), I propose that its significance in cinema must be examined more closely; as my frame of reference I will use Laura Marks’s extensive research into the subject, in which she posits the image as evoking the sensation of touch within the viewer (162). No longer the codifier of a set of ideas or feelings, the image becomes the feeling in this approach, and instead of establishing a connection between aesthetics and content, the viewer receives the image on a purely visceral level.