I just watched Obsession. That's Brian De Palma's Obsession. De Palma had gained attention with a few thrillers in the preceding years, very much descendants of Hitchcock. This one feels like the first time he had something of a big budget. As a couple of examples, the middle of the film is shot on location in Venice, and he got to work with composer Bernard Herrmann.
The story is a bit of a midpoint between Vertigo and Oldboy, and it doesn't always make sense. Genevieve Bujold is quite lovely, though, and gives an engaging performance once she appears as the second of her two characters. John Lithgow is good too. Oddly enough, he was actually younger than Bujold.
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I don't know why I tend to think I don't much like Brian de Palma movies until I look at a list of those I remember having watched and see that a number of them were pretty good: Mission Impossible, The Black Dahlia, Carlito's Way, The Bonfire of the Vanities, The Untouchables, Body Double, and Scarface. We've definitely seen all of them, but never Carrie and neither of us can recall having seen Obsession.
I like your comparison of the story seeming like a cross between Vertigo and Oldboy, both films made by directors we admire. It's almost like de Palma had to emulate a director respected by everyone in order to gain confidence in his own ability, or as it happened, to take pleasure in his own weirdness.
I haven't see that many of her movies but I've always admired Genevieve Bujold in the ones I've seen. Her innocent quality is backed by a formidable strength of character.
De Palma doesn't really come off well in interviews but he's got great visual sense as well as a sense of pacing. He's certainly got a lot of significant movies under his belt. That even includes early, low budget thrillers like Sisters and Phantom of the Paradise. I've never seen Bonfire of the Vanities. It sounds like he took a lot of liberties with the book, which itself is entertaining but not a classic. Maybe it's a wash.
The Vertigo parallels are obviously deliberate, although there are divergences. Whether anyone involved with Oldboy saw this I don't know, but there are some heavy coincidences otherwise. Hitchcock was irreplaceable, but a lot of directors learned from him, and a lot of them seemed to crank up their activity in the 70s. David Fincher is a later example.
I don't really know Bujold well at all. She was in a David Cronenberg movie called Dead Ringers with Jeremy Irons. I like what I've seen of her.
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